> The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
I am now seriously worried that a Strong AI collective is astroturfing in this human forum to engender sympathy for the poor, innocent machines. Who pays your salary, DonHopkins--our Go-Dominating Overlords?
(The ridiculous part of the whole thing was that this happened even when the game was running from the hard drive. Obviously this was at least partly a measure to ensure that the disc verified on startup wasn't removed and used to boot other Xboxes - but you didn't get even a 30 second grace period to close the drive door. And I'm pretty sure it also happened when playing downloadable games too anyway!)
...you can figure out what happened to anyone who already owned an Xbox One.
If airplane mode is turned on and my GPS disabled as I'm close to the my right turn you better believe I'll be distracted.
A better solution would be a true hands free mode that prevented touch input from working while driving.
> On January 1, 1965, miffed at having to work on the holiday, Sales ended his live broadcast by encouraging his young viewers to tiptoe into their still-sleeping parents' bedrooms and remove those "funny green pieces of paper with pictures of U.S. Presidents" from their pants and pocketbooks. "Put them in an envelope and mail them to me", Soupy instructed the children. "And I'll send you a postcard from Puerto Rico!"
Imagine a pop star paying Apple to give their newest single free to everyone (a la Songs of Innocence), and then a 10-second Super Bowl ad that's just "Hey Siri, play ___" with a dancing silhouette.
Imagine this happening in movie theaters during trailers.
"Hey Siri, turn off"
But even if humans can hear the fraudulent commands, what's the defense beyond a confirmation?
I recall an apocryphal story about a demo of a voice-controlled OS from the 1990s. The idea was that in the middle of this demo someone shouted out a sequence of destructive commands, like
"FORMAT C!", "YES!" (I'm sure)
or
"FILE", "DELETE", "NO" (Don't save)
Really wish I could find the original source.
http://grumpytech.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/joke-becomes-true.h...
Also, don't forget "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all":
Or TV ads with Skype/Facebook notification sounds embedded in them for the same reason.
You can change the default from alexa to something else.
"Alexa, call 911 to this address"
"Alexa, delete all my photos. Yes confirmed"
Here's the skit: https://youtu.be/puJePACBoIo?t=215 .
These are all jokes based on in-band signalling failures.
It's now company policy that built-in microphones have to be disabled, and only external ones are allowed to be used when necessary.
You sure get it.
Accurate language processing is a huge technical achievement but let's not elevate this particular use of the technology to more than it is. It's a clapper with more functions. When a device like this can actually understand the commands or queries its given we can call it something more.
One side effect I've noticed is that they seem to have tried to account for it, which has made the Echo less responsive to actual requests; a few times I've stood in front of it yelling 'ALEXA' trying to get it to stop and it does not respond.
We have ours set to Alexa (default) and when the neighbor girl comes over (Alexis) the Echo frequently wakes during conversations.
- Yo Hitler
- Hello Mussolini
- Hey Stalin
/Xə/ == triggering.
The end result was that the player would do something obnoxious, and somebody would ask them to stop, but of course this necessitates saying their gamer tag. So you'd get audio clips of people saying stuff like "Oh my god, xboxturnoff is so freaking - WAIT NO CANCEL CANCEL XBOX TURN ON".
It was pretty good stuff.
It's repeatable, too. One time it happened right as I was parking, on an episode of This American Life. (Or Serial. Or Planet Money. Yeah, yeah, I listen to a lot of NPR shows.) So I kept rewinding back over that part, and it kept triggering Siri.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/3oxi7b/commerci...
[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/people-are-complaining-that...
http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/news/a483565/xbox-360s-kine...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177
"Forbin is the designer of an incredibly sophisticated computer that will run all of America's nuclear defenses. Shortly after being turned on, it detects the existence of Guardian, the Soviet counterpart, previously unknown to US Planners. Both computers insist that they be linked, and after taking safeguards to preserve confidential material, each side agrees to allow it..."
Had to stop it and change the wake word back to "Alexa".
Seems like a very similar sort of abuse, except potentially much more dangerous ("Alexa, order me 500 Shamwow's!"). I doubt a ban would eliminate it, but it'd definitely get rid of most.
The show went through the opening sequence, then announced "Previously on Battlestar Galactica" at which point the xbox rewound back to the beginning of the show.
Better might be to learn the location of audio producing devices (TV, radio, stereo, etc. [it tracks sound origin with multiple mics right?]) and track whether the command came from that direction and use that as a Bayesian factor for whether to trust the voice as being a user?
"Siri us xm..."
with the iphone plugged in to charge while driving to work hilarity ensues as it cuts out the audio to speak of whatever it thinks was asked.
