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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.
If someone has one of these spy devices in their home they deserve all the worst the world has to offer.
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.
It doesn't need to be an inaudible frequency, it just needs to be hidden from human ears but distinguishable for machines. Nielsen's system (Psychoacoustic encoding) uses audible sounds hidden under the regular broadcast audio (and this is why they don't encode during silent segments of audio in shows or commercials).
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
#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)
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.
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"