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Why Alexa Won't Light Up During Amazon's Super Bowl Ad (bloomberg.com)
Bloomberg: Amazon.com is advertising its Alexa-powered speakers in the big game on Sunday. It's an amusing 90 seconds that features celebrities like Gordon Ramsay, Rebel Wilson, Anthony Hopkins, Cardi B and the world's wealthiest man, Jeff Bezos himself. The word "Alexa" is uttered 10 times during the Super Bowl spot, but thankfully, the Amazon Echo in your living room isn't going to perk up and try to respond.
Bezos and company have evidently been thinking about this problem for a long time, before the Echo was even introduced. A September 2014 Amazon patent titled "Audible command filtering" describes techniques to prevent Alexa from waking up "as part of a broadcast watched by a large population (such as during a popular sporting event)," annoying customers and overloading Amazon's servers with millions of simultaneous requests. The patent broadly describes two techniques. The first calls for transmitting a snippet of a commercial to Echo devices before it airs. Then the Echo can compare live commands to the acoustic fingerprint of the snippet to determine whether the commands are authentic. The second tactic describes how a commercial itself could transmit an inaudible acoustic signal to tell Alexa to ignore its wake word.
Bezos and company have evidently been thinking about this problem for a long time, before the Echo was even introduced. A September 2014 Amazon patent titled "Audible command filtering" describes techniques to prevent Alexa from waking up "as part of a broadcast watched by a large population (such as during a popular sporting event)," annoying customers and overloading Amazon's servers with millions of simultaneous requests. The patent broadly describes two techniques. The first calls for transmitting a snippet of a commercial to Echo devices before it airs. Then the Echo can compare live commands to the acoustic fingerprint of the snippet to determine whether the commands are authentic. The second tactic describes how a commercial itself could transmit an inaudible acoustic signal to tell Alexa to ignore its wake word.
So either they're assuming the device will be able to produce the required frequency, or my dog will go nuts. God help us.
The second tactic describes how a commercial itself could transmit an inaudible acoustic signal to tell Alexa to ignore its wake word.
Step 1: A dedicated, battery operated, highly miniature device to emit said signal
Step 2: ??? Alexa remains silent...
Step 3: Profit!
I had a chimp that would punch someone every time someone said "Right Turn Clyde". Finally I was able to train him to ignore it unless I snapped my fingers afterward.
So they can still episodes that will trigger Alexa
If someone has one of these spy devices in their home they deserve all the worst the world has to offer.
Another Amazon(tm) solution for a problem they've created...
transmit an inaudible acoustic signal to [..] Alexa
But we promise we're not using this to send a tiny packet indicating you were exposed to a given advertisement, so we can send that to advertisers for money.
...Why are you laughing? We can tell because you paid for an always-on, internet-connected microphone in your home.
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
That's actually a really good point... and one that I was going to mention myself. Does anybody know what the upper cap is on frequencies that can be produced by modern audio equipment? I'm betting that if they can even produce inaudible frequencies at all, it's not liable to be much higher than the maximum human hearing frequency, and that would still be well within the hearing range of many household pets, so I think we'd need to investigate that carefully before filling people's homes with it. If they can make sounds like at about 150khz or more (which I doubt), then we should be fine. I can't think of any household pet that one might have with that kind of hearing range. If not, however, this may not be a very smart thing to do, depending on how the sound affects them.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
south park messed up lot's of alexa's with there stunt
Another reason Im getting rid of this hunk of junk.
This is also why Alexa is sort of dumb, it does not learn people's voices it simply responds to a command. Of course rather then make Alexa smarter Amazon has chosen to find away around its lack of intelligence.
If Alexa responded to commercials and randomly awarded a year of free Amazon Prime to the viewer.
Surely the super duper AI in Alexa can tell if the command is from a TV, or from someone in the room? Even a two year old can do that!!!
#3: Leave it unplugged from power unless you're actively using it
#4: Don't buy the goddamned thing in the first place (preferred solution)
Alexa, enslave these puny humans send them to the Amazon warehouse at area 51.
The patent broadly describes two techniques. The first calls for transmitting a snippet of a commercial to Echo devices before it airs. Then the Echo can compare live commands to the acoustic fingerprint of the snippet to determine whether the commands are authentic. The second tactic describes how a commercial itself could transmit an inaudible acoustic signal to tell Alexa to ignore its wake word.
'Acoustic fingerprint' comparison is used all the time to search sites like Youtube for rights violations. And transmitting an audible signal to tell an electronic device to do or not do something has been around for decades. So these examples of prior art are suddenly new and patentable 'because Alexa'? Gimme a break! Can there be any better indication of how thoroughly the patent system is broken?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
The upper limit for FM used in television broadcasting is 15 KHz.
This highlights a much larger problem with balancing ease of use with authentication.
Suppose there's a tone Alexa hears and that causes it to ignore its "wake word". What happens when someone broadcasts that tone, rendering Alexa unable to wake up?
What happens when it's not just a stupid, crappy little speaker/device for allowing you to buy more shit from Amazon? What happens when it's a full-blown autonomous android walking around your home, making you breakfast, etc., and it gets told, via a hidden tone you can't hear, "for breakfast, I'd like cereal topped with rat poison"? So it hears the tone, and says, "coming right up, sir" and serves you corn flakes with rat poison on top? Or it hears "come bring me a toaster while I'm taking a bath... use the extension cord, it obviously won't reach from all the way in the kitchen..." via this hidden command channel?
A better solution MIGHT be letting users decide what word or name or combination of sounds wakes "Alexa". This might be good for people who have trouble producing certain sounds, like "L" clearly, or people who knew someone named Alexa and would prefer not to have to talk to anyone with the same name. Having a hardwired password (which is basically what that is,) is a stupid idea supposedly smart organizations with supposedly genius leaders somehow can't let go of, probably because of "branding".
Well, enjoy your Amazon Spy, or whatever. Thankfully, I never shelled out real cash for junk like that. (I also don't use Google Glass, Hey Google, Hey Siri, Hey Samsung, Hey Whatever, etc.... that's what KEYBOARDS are for.) Also, I have yet to find a 'virtual assistant' or whatever that understands what I'm saying anyway, and no, I don't have a speech impediment. Voice recognition just still sucks ass.
"Alexa order two tons of creamed corn"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Amateur radio and commercial radio systems have been using something like this for many decades, except it is the opposite. Only when a sub-audible tone (or more specifically, a tone that is not within the normal filtered audio output range of the radio) of a specific frequency is received will the radio "recognize" the signal and open the squelch so the audio can be heard. This is reverse CTCSS, where the tone must not be present for the audio to be processed. They can also use such a tone to "mute" Alexa for, say, 30 seconds at a time. So the tone (or tone sequence - like a little jingle or chime) can be played at the beginning of the commercial and can easily be heard, and then Alexa mutes for the next 30 seconds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Better known as 318230.
The problem isn't that a specific ad can trigger this thing, the problem is that ANYBODY can trigger this thing.
If they actually cared about privacy, security, or the end users, they'd work hard on voiceprinting technologies so that it only responds to it's owner and nobody else. That would simultaneously solve this problem, as well as that of other malicious advertisers, and that of random drunk friend thinking it's funny to order hundreds of things with it.
Not that I think voiceprints are particularly secure or reliable, but it's infinitely more secure than what they have now.
"South Park", "lots", and "their", not to mention a missing period.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
No, no it isn't. It's 90 seconds of blather trying to sell you a piece of shit you don't need that has no purpose.
Just today, listening to a news broadcast and the announcer said "time" and Alexa gave me the time. Nothing remotely like the activation work preceeded it. Meanwhile, I get to the store and my Alexa generated grocery list is a jumble of misheard items I must decipher. I just checked right now and I have "grape ground beef", "risotto martin final", "risotto smart and final" and my favorite "masker pone un trader joe's you idiot"
Of these things in my house. They are always on, always listening. Television can broadcast something like a "audio QR" code that humans probably won't hear, or, can't understand, but the little speaker/microphone thingy can. No, not paranoid, just don't want something like that in my home.
Previously, when Alexa heard its name on an ad, it would briefly light up, but would then (presumably by sending audio back to the mothership and having it rejected) shut down again.
Now, they've started fudging with the audio, so instead of saying "Alexa" it sounds like "Alekfa" and doesn't trigger it at all.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
No not really.
Had I only read the summary, I would have been left believing that the only reason anyone thinks Amazon is actually doing this is because someone was trolling through Amazon patents and concluded that because they got a patent on an idea they must be practicing it. Here's the real meat of TFA:
About a year ago, a Reddit user calling himself Asphyhackr did a little more legwork and concluded that Amazon was creatively employing this second technique. By running Alexa commercials through digital audio editing software, Asphyhackr discovered that Alexa ads transmit weakened levels of sound in an upper portion of the audio spectrum, between 3,000 and 6,000 hertz, outside the most sensitive range of human hearing.
Asphyhackr speculated that Amazon could be tipping Alexa off to ignore certain commands if it detects artificial gaps or bumps in the spectrum. To test his theory, he recorded someone saying “Alexa” and used a so-called band-stop filter that reduced frequencies just in this high region of the spectrum. When he played back the recording, “My echo would not wake, even sitting right next to the speakers!” he wrote.
Amazon just blogged about this topic and shed perhaps a bit more light on it. The company credited "acoustic fingerprinting technology that can distinguish between the ad and actual customer utterances" and said that its advertising, engineering and science teams prepare for major events like the Super Bowl commercial, in order to suppress Alexa devices from responding to it. When a major broadcast of the wake word "Alexa" is unanticipated -- for example, when it’s mentioned on the “Tonight Show” -- Amazon said its cloud servers can detect a match, create an audio fingerprint on the fly and can prevent 80 to 90 percent of devices from responding.
'Alexas' as well. Well, anyway, full points to any advertiser who purposely fucks with everyone's Alexas.
I suddenly wish I was a very popular streamer on twitch or youtube. I would record this 'inaudible acoustic signal' and isolate it using trial and error, and just play it back continuously throughout my stream.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Will Echo call home to tell Amazon you watched the add?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.