South Park's Season Premier Sets Off Everyone's Amazon Echo (maxim.com)

SonicSpike writes: It's hard to believe that Trey Parker and Matt Stone didn't know exactly what they were doing with Wednesday night's season premiere of South Park. This episode marked the beginning of the show's 21st season and as usual, South Park took on current issues like tiki torch-wielding white supremacists and... home digital assistants. The latter meant lots of gags in which Cartman and other characters addressed Amazon Echo's Alexa and Google Home as well. And that ended up being a problem for viewers who own those devices. (Editor's note: example 1, 2) South Park writers absolutely knew their lines would do this and probably had a hilarious time coming up with funny commands for the home assistants.

Comments

No sympathy

[DarkOx]

Sorry if you are stupid enough to allow some company to basically put a hot-mic in your home, well I don't feel sorry about any problems you encounter as a result of that.

Re: No sympathy

[unrtst]

I'm not trying to change your mind, nor that of the GP, but there is *some* security built in.

For starters, it's not a simple hot mic. The audio is only sent anywhere if the keyword is first heard. It does audio recognition only of the keyword(s) locally, and the rest of it is done remotely if that keyword gets picked up. That said, I'd be surprised if a software update or bug couldn't cause it to stream all data, but it's not doing so all day long.

For certain actions (ex. purchases done through it), it can be setup to require an additional pin code, or those actions can be disabled altogether. This limits the potential impact of someone saying stuff to it. They can mess up your shopping list, play music, have it answer dumb questions, etc, but they can't (easily) have it make purchases.

They also have different models of them. For example, if you wanted one that isn't always listening, but you wanted the rest of the features, you could get the "Amazon Tap", which requires you to tap a button before it'll listen. I'm not well versed in the other providers (google home, etc), but amazon has:

* echo : has 7 mics that use beam-forming stuff, and a nice speaker.
* echo dot : just that nice mic array, no speaker. You provide your own speaker, otherwise it's basically the same as the echo.
* tap : it's basically just the speaker part of the echo, and you can tap it to speak to one mic. It's also portable (has battery) and works as a bluetooth speaker (as does the echo).
* echo show : 8 mics, speaker, camera, and a screen so it can show you stuff too, and do video calls.
* echo look : (this one seems weird IMO) mics, camera, led lighting (for camera), speaker, and a mic&camera off button (kinda like the show without a screen).
* alexa voice remote : This can connect to the echo or echo dot. There's a mic in the remote, and some buttons. IMO, it'd be nice if this worked with the tap, so you wouldn't have to stand next to it. It provides a way to have a hardware button control a mic though, so this could provide added security if your echo dot was shielded from external audio.

Some day, voice recognition stuff might provide some more security to the echo/echo dot/echo show/etc, but I don't think that would really change anybodies mind... recording someone elses voice is pretty easy. It would prevent a TV show from triggering every device out there though. So, if you don't want the risk, there are other options... but you probably just don't like any of them.

I just thought people might want to know that they've really covered just about every combo of hardware features that one of these could have.

Re:No, it didn't

[Krishnoid]

A few very simple things to ask it:

• play music you purchased via your Amazon account
• the current time
• set timers/alarms
• general-information questions that wikipedia would have the answer to
• current weather/traffic in your area (?)

Not that impressive, but you can think of it as a $50 voice-controlled alarm clock/timer/stereo which may add new features in the future. I consider it an inexpensive one-time purchase that buys me continuous (for now) access to something of a potluck of Amazon's continuously updated cloud services.

Re:Genius

[TheDayOfMe]

Interestingly, the number of teaspoons to tablespoons is different in in different countries and era of the cookbook.
The standard Australian tablespoon is 20ml, 4 teaspoons, but that we get mostly chinese made stuff now tablespoons are now mostly 15ml. The standard tablespoon in India used by 25ml.
Just a sample: Beware of the Tablespoon