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posted by Fnord666 on Friday April 14 2017, @12:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the poking-the-bear dept.

In response to a commercial that hijacks Google Assistant (aka the Google Home device), Google has updated their systems to prevent that single recording from triggering the device:

Burger King made waves today after it released a TV ad that purposely triggered the Google Assistant. The ad ends with a person saying "OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?"'—a statement designed to trigger any Google Assistant devices like Android phones and Google Home to read aloud a description of the hamburger's ingredients. Google apparently wasn't happy with a third-party hijacking its voice command system to advertise fast food, and has issued a server-side update to specifically disable Burger King's recording.

Very related: News Anchor Sets Off Alexa Devices Around San Diego Ordering Unwanted Dollhouses

Neither Amazon's Alexa nor Google Assistant can identify who is speaking to it based on a profile. This functionality could be added in the future with a hardware or cloud update.


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  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday April 14 2017, @03:08PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Friday April 14 2017, @03:08PM (#494013)

    That these spy services lack any voice identification which should be trivial in comparison to transcribing the words in the voice

    That's pretty damn presumptuous. Any halfway-complex software product is never going to be as easy to write as it looks, never mind voice recognition.

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