1. Publish an album with 1000 short, quiet tracks and a very unique name to all of the online streaming services
2. Buy ads on late-night television with a very clear voice that says "OK Google, play album <unique name>. Alexa, play album <unique name>. Hey Siri, play album <unique name>."
3. Rack up the fraction-of-a-penny residuals as my songs play to people who've fallen asleep with the television on!
A (very awesome) band called Vulfpeck actually ran an experiment where they released an album called "Sleepify" that contained then 30 second silent tracks and asked all of their supporters to stream the album on repeat nightly. Their idea was to do this long enough to be able to fund a free tour. If I remember correctly, they ended up netting like $35,000 or something from this before Spotify removed the album.
I wonder if it's possible to trigger one of these smart speakers from its own output. If so, the last track on your album could be the command to "play album <unique name part n+1>".
FYI a Burger King marketing exec modified the entry on Wikipedia to be more "Ad-like", initially using the name, "Burger King Corporation" before that was banned for having a promotional name.
Then the ad guy came back using his online screenname, and re-added the promotional introduction before it was reverted several times (along with an author from The Verge editing it, probably the edit that changed the wording to something like "[it] tastes like cyanide", but can't be too sure)
It was then astroturfed by some pro-Burger King sockpuppets (unsure of this but their changes all switch to the wording that the Burger King ad guy used), before finally being locked for disruptive editing.
Furthermore, the Wikipedia article itself now has a section about the attempted astroturfing by Burger King, and another Wikipedia user came back in and cited NPOV problems with the _original_ pre-ad wording (e.g. usage of the word "signature") so now the wording in the article is even more generic and less favorable to the Whopper than when it first started.
Do these people have no idea how much they are annoying their own customers?
I just bought a google home (it's only just been released here), and if it either plays me adverts, or other adverts (ab)use it - I will return it to the store without hesitation.
This was not sold as an ad-supported service.
To take an extreme position - Google should take Burger King to court via the computer fraud and abuse act - they've just performed a distributed denial of service attack on google's servers by using thousands of peoples google devices simultaneously without their permission.
Also - this is a key reason why google need to spend some time on supporting custom hot words for google home. 'OK google' and 'Alexa' are the audio equivalent of IoT devices with a default 'username:admin, password:password' on your network.
really? People voluntarily installed a listening device in their homes. That should no way encroach on complete freedom of speech, no matter how tricky.
I can't believe that those ad execs really believe that people want intrusions like that. That they'd want the TV to hack their Home into advertising to them. That's just bullshit.
Google should change the autoresponse for burger king.
"Hey Google what is a whopper?"
"A whopper is a tall tale which clever executives want to sell you but really tastes of cardboard"
Lot of people are already bringing up various concerns. I hope this is precisely what it does here in HN and outside. Talk about concerns regarding about these devices.
Is there anyway for end user to know what "wake up" keywords are? How do I know it's not listening for keywords like "buy" (example: "You should `buy` milk") and then targeting adds that way?
What happens next time FBI decides it wants google (et. all) to leave its device "always awake" on some person of interest ?
Can a third party somehow compromise the security to change the list of "wake up" word?
Maybe you can add voice recognition along with keyword to make sure it's only responding to authorized people. But even then, seeing how far machine learning has come, is it really a security?
On a side note, do these devices only capture human audible range of signals? Or is there ways to send non-human audible signals with commands and wake word and what not? Dog whistle for alexia or Home .. Alexia whistle?
> On a side note, do these devices only capture human audible range of signals?
I wonder about this one. Everyone's device has the same "password" (i.e. "wake word"), the device is attached to your home network and associated with your credit card, and programmatic ads apparently receive little to no vetting. Even if there are no bugs in the code that sends the audio to Google/Amazon and deals with the results, I'm reminded of an article here awhile back about researchers creating special eyeglass frames to make one face look like a completely different one to modern zillion-parameter facial recognition algorithms. This will not end well.
> What happens next time FBI decides it was [sic] google to leave its device "always awake" on some person of interest ?
It seems like figuring out how to exploit these types of devices to be "always-on listening devices" is exactly the type of thing NSA, et al., would be interested in doing.
> Asked whether he was concerned that consumers might find the spot invasive, he said, “We think about our guests’ perception and their perspective on how we interact with them, but on balance we felt this was a really positive way to connect with them.”
I'm always amazed at the universe some marketing people seem to live in. It must be a beautiful place.
There's a way to prevent this, but I doubt any of the major players will do it:
Allow the owners of the device choose their own "activation words".
Leave the default "branded" activation sentence as-is, but allow the user to customize it as they see fit. This won't happen, of course, because of the whole "branding" thing (like the user is going to forget which service they are using?).
This just hammers another nail into my decision not to get one of these devices; instead, it would probably be easier and better to build my own, using a raspberry pi or something similar for the "front end". I'd probably still have to use one of the big players search engines or such, but I could also hit anything else I wanted to, as well.
I tend to wonder if this is going to be the trend? Those who have or desire more freedom will have to build it themselves, and those who can't or won't - they'll just have to shoulder the burden of not being as free...
There are ways the State could make DIY uneconomical or near-to-impossible (and I don't think the scenario is realistic anyhow) - but if that ever happened - if things ever got to the point of it just being too much - I'll just go offline. I've got more than enough data and junk to keep me amused for the rest of my life. Plus, I don't think I'm alone in that sentiment, either.
Freely available speech to text is garbage compared to what the big players are doing. Additionally their activation words usually trigger a special microcontroller extensively trained to listen for such a phrase, and then the more expensive processing kicks in.
I really just want to be able to activate my devices' voice control by saying "Computer". Siri/Alexa/Google just don't have the same Star Trek ring to them ;)
To be perfectly honest, pointing people's smart home devices at a page that anyone can edit with a few mouseclicks does not strike me as a very smart PR move. This will not end well.
I was remarking at lunch today that for so long the goal of speech recognition was 'speaker independent' recognition and now that is a handicap.
Early speech input systems required an individual to read several pre-defined words, usually several times, in order to train the algorithm to understand their speech. And then the next person to use the system would have to do the same. This was considered a 'negative' because everyone wanted systems that anyone could use.
Now however, there is a tremendous need for your phone, or tablet, or commercial listening device, to be able to distinguish between who is talking so that different policies can be established based on the speaker. That will be the next killer feature in the voice wars I'm guessing.
Are you serious? Oh, to be a fly on the wall of the conference room where these things are pitched and discussed...
> “We think about our guests’ perception and their perspective on how we interact with them, but on balance we felt this was a really positive way to connect with them.”
Perhaps I'm too cynical or jaded by the trends in the evolving relationships between individuals, communities, businesses and our shared technology, but I see way too much negative in this type of connection.
The only positive aspect to this is that Google/Amazon/Whoever must now find a way for users to create their own audio triggers for their devices in order to protect them from this type of invasive BS or else we need to go through the lengthy and expensive process of defining and legislating the relationship between users and their AI such that activating and using another person's AI is illegal... or is it even your AI to begin with?
Thanks for the philosophical/legal quandary Burger King, but as I've always personally maintained, fuck you.
Peoples' attention is getting expensive. The important thing is that your name is recognizable and easily associated with your product. Positive connotations can come later.
Easy fix for google/alexa-- MAKE people name their 'assistants', when everyone answers to a different name we can simply say hey joe what's the weather -- sure sometimes TV might influence it, but most likely not, that and add voice recognition (surprised it doesn't already have that actually)
Edit: I'd personally rather give my assistant a name I pick, than keep saying 'OK google'.
It's potentially a lot worse for Amazon/Google than it is for Burger King. I bet a lot of people will reconsider purchasing these devices based on just this one incident. Most people might not react as strongly but if this happened to me I'd immediately unplug the device and throw it away. Actually I might just go ahead and smash it to bits too. Just thinking about the possibility of it happening makes me quite angry.
What would be great is if this put a serious dent in people's excitement about creepy always-listening internet-connected devices. Instead, I predict it will result in some new FCC rules about broadcast advertising.
Not really. A criminal offense would only apply if the smart device can be construed as a 'protected computer' involved in interstate commerce; a civil complaint is only possible if the plaintiff suffers one or more of an enumerated list of 'loss' [1], neither of which appears to be a good fit for the interaction without a serious stretch.
[+] [-] evan_|9 years ago|reply
1. Publish an album with 1000 short, quiet tracks and a very unique name to all of the online streaming services
2. Buy ads on late-night television with a very clear voice that says "OK Google, play album <unique name>. Alexa, play album <unique name>. Hey Siri, play album <unique name>."
3. Rack up the fraction-of-a-penny residuals as my songs play to people who've fallen asleep with the television on!
[+] [-] bherms|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kej|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swang|9 years ago|reply
Then the ad guy came back using his online screenname, and re-added the promotional introduction before it was reverted several times (along with an author from The Verge editing it, probably the edit that changed the wording to something like "[it] tastes like cyanide", but can't be too sure)
It was then astroturfed by some pro-Burger King sockpuppets (unsure of this but their changes all switch to the wording that the Burger King ad guy used), before finally being locked for disruptive editing.
Furthermore, the Wikipedia article itself now has a section about the attempted astroturfing by Burger King, and another Wikipedia user came back in and cited NPOV problems with the _original_ pre-ad wording (e.g. usage of the word "signature") so now the wording in the article is even more generic and less favorable to the Whopper than when it first started.
[+] [-] tempestn|9 years ago|reply
http://fortune.com/2017/04/11/wendys-chicken-nuggets-teen-tw...
http://www.boredpanda.com/funny-wendy-jokes/
(Although in reality I expect if another company tried to pull this off, it'd backfire horribly.)
[+] [-] StringyBob|9 years ago|reply
I just bought a google home (it's only just been released here), and if it either plays me adverts, or other adverts (ab)use it - I will return it to the store without hesitation. This was not sold as an ad-supported service.
To take an extreme position - Google should take Burger King to court via the computer fraud and abuse act - they've just performed a distributed denial of service attack on google's servers by using thousands of peoples google devices simultaneously without their permission.
Also - this is a key reason why google need to spend some time on supporting custom hot words for google home. 'OK google' and 'Alexa' are the audio equivalent of IoT devices with a default 'username:admin, password:password' on your network.
[+] [-] hughw|9 years ago|reply
It certainly is unauthorized use of a computer... not a stretch at all.
[+] [-] axaxs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crowbahr|9 years ago|reply
I can't believe that those ad execs really believe that people want intrusions like that. That they'd want the TV to hack their Home into advertising to them. That's just bullshit.
Google should change the autoresponse for burger king.
"Hey Google what is a whopper?" "A whopper is a tall tale which clever executives want to sell you but really tastes of cardboard"
[+] [-] itchyjunk|9 years ago|reply
Is there anyway for end user to know what "wake up" keywords are? How do I know it's not listening for keywords like "buy" (example: "You should `buy` milk") and then targeting adds that way?
What happens next time FBI decides it wants google (et. all) to leave its device "always awake" on some person of interest ?
Can a third party somehow compromise the security to change the list of "wake up" word?
Maybe you can add voice recognition along with keyword to make sure it's only responding to authorized people. But even then, seeing how far machine learning has come, is it really a security?
On a side note, do these devices only capture human audible range of signals? Or is there ways to send non-human audible signals with commands and wake word and what not? Dog whistle for alexia or Home .. Alexia whistle?
Edit: typos and clarity
[+] [-] username223|9 years ago|reply
I wonder about this one. Everyone's device has the same "password" (i.e. "wake word"), the device is attached to your home network and associated with your credit card, and programmatic ads apparently receive little to no vetting. Even if there are no bugs in the code that sends the audio to Google/Amazon and deals with the results, I'm reminded of an article here awhile back about researchers creating special eyeglass frames to make one face look like a completely different one to modern zillion-parameter facial recognition algorithms. This will not end well.
[+] [-] jlgaddis|9 years ago|reply
It seems like figuring out how to exploit these types of devices to be "always-on listening devices" is exactly the type of thing NSA, et al., would be interested in doing.
[+] [-] akovaski|9 years ago|reply
Do you not own a smartphone that could conceivably be compromised in the same way?
[+] [-] nepthar|9 years ago|reply
Then I ask it to look up flights to Syria.
[+] [-] xg15|9 years ago|reply
I'm always amazed at the universe some marketing people seem to live in. It must be a beautiful place.
[+] [-] cr0sh|9 years ago|reply
Allow the owners of the device choose their own "activation words".
Leave the default "branded" activation sentence as-is, but allow the user to customize it as they see fit. This won't happen, of course, because of the whole "branding" thing (like the user is going to forget which service they are using?).
This just hammers another nail into my decision not to get one of these devices; instead, it would probably be easier and better to build my own, using a raspberry pi or something similar for the "front end". I'd probably still have to use one of the big players search engines or such, but I could also hit anything else I wanted to, as well.
I tend to wonder if this is going to be the trend? Those who have or desire more freedom will have to build it themselves, and those who can't or won't - they'll just have to shoulder the burden of not being as free...
There are ways the State could make DIY uneconomical or near-to-impossible (and I don't think the scenario is realistic anyhow) - but if that ever happened - if things ever got to the point of it just being too much - I'll just go offline. I've got more than enough data and junk to keep me amused for the rest of my life. Plus, I don't think I'm alone in that sentiment, either.
[+] [-] tokenizerrr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eric_h|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maaaats|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Millennium|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awirth|9 years ago|reply
Note that the edit in question stood (with a small edit to s/mayo/mayonnaise/ and remove some WP:PEACOCK language) for about a week.
There's also some interesting discussion on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Whopper
[+] [-] recursive|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|9 years ago|reply
Early speech input systems required an individual to read several pre-defined words, usually several times, in order to train the algorithm to understand their speech. And then the next person to use the system would have to do the same. This was considered a 'negative' because everyone wanted systems that anyone could use.
Now however, there is a tremendous need for your phone, or tablet, or commercial listening device, to be able to distinguish between who is talking so that different policies can be established based on the speaker. That will be the next killer feature in the voice wars I'm guessing.
[+] [-] kalleboo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gooseus|9 years ago|reply
> “We think about our guests’ perception and their perspective on how we interact with them, but on balance we felt this was a really positive way to connect with them.”
Perhaps I'm too cynical or jaded by the trends in the evolving relationships between individuals, communities, businesses and our shared technology, but I see way too much negative in this type of connection.
The only positive aspect to this is that Google/Amazon/Whoever must now find a way for users to create their own audio triggers for their devices in order to protect them from this type of invasive BS or else we need to go through the lengthy and expensive process of defining and legislating the relationship between users and their AI such that activating and using another person's AI is illegal... or is it even your AI to begin with?
Thanks for the philosophical/legal quandary Burger King, but as I've always personally maintained, fuck you.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beojan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leggomylibro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] skullum|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrbill|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smhenderson|9 years ago|reply
A quick search just turned up similar articles to the post with a statement that Google had nothing to do with ad and declined to comment.
[+] [-] inerte|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowbloodsugar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gremlinsinc|9 years ago|reply
Edit: I'd personally rather give my assistant a name I pick, than keep saying 'OK google'.
[+] [-] kyork|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snickerbockers|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZainRiz|9 years ago|reply
Good foresight by Burger King to jump on this before anyone else. But I hope everyone stops doing this really soon too.
[+] [-] TylerE|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsz0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burntrelish1273|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmagin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siliconc0w|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temp-dude-87844|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act_(...
[+] [-] crowbahr|9 years ago|reply