I don’t understand why we have to be stuck with “OK, Google,” Or “Hey, Siri.” We can customize our ringtones, why can’t we customize our command delimiter?
[Afternoon update]
OK, so here’s my problem with these devices and software. In order for them to work, they have to be always listening. WHich means they could be continuously recording. Which means that someone could hack your phone, and listen and record as well.
Jasper, which runs on Raspberry Pis, does.
I want mine to respond to, “Adjutant” and refer to me as “Commander”.
If I had one, it would call me “Insert Name Here” and it would call itself “Blueberry”
http://lovemyecho.com/2015/11/11/echo-custom-wake-words-why-isnt-this-a-thing-yet/
It has always been obvious to me that such devices should answer to “Majel.”
Um, did you view the last five seconds of the video?
Also, this:
http://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/1/23/14365338/amazon-echo-alexa-computer-wake-word-star-trek
I have now. (I generally don’t bother with WSJ due to the paywall annoyance.)
I’ve known since I bought my widget that there were a few choices for the wake word. I was slightly surprised that none of them were “Majel.”
Can these gadgets read lips and then lock you out of your house by disabling your garage-door opener?
“Open the pod bay doors, HAL.”
Back in school my budding redefined the keys on my terminal so I couldn’t give the command to redefine them back.
The Dragon personal assistant thing will let you change the command word and what it refers to you by.
I tried using it to send a text message and it was the the longest most annoying process in the world ever. It was worse than autocorrect changing favorite words to duck and not having a vocabulary as large as mine own, and my vocabulary is probably of an average size.
I’ve found that Android’s voice recognition works really well for text messages as long as you make a little bit of an effort to enunciate clearly.
Yes, a friend showed me that, to try to convince me to let go of my mechanical keyboard. But I still don’t like the “always listening” part.
Oh, it can recognize your words just fine in most cases but the process of sending a text message is a long one.
“Send text to Tom.”
“Would you like to send a text message to Tom?”
“Yes”
“What would you like to say”
“Hey bro, lets meet up for Taco Tuesday.”
“Is your message, ‘Hey bro, lets meet up for Taco Tuesday.”
“Yes”
“Would you like to change your message?”
“No”
“Please say ‘send’ to send your message.”
“Send”
That is only a very slight exaggeration.
The linked story was behind a paywall so I may be repeating something from that article. Prosecutors for a murder case in Arkansas want Amazon to provide whatever Alexa “heard” from the time of the crime:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/28/tech/amazon-echo-alexa-bentonville-arkansas-murder-case-trnd/
Don’t forget that, as I understand it, they also send what you say to remote servers to do the actual speech recognition.
And Winston leaned to love the Telescreen.
This is “fake news”. If you’ve got a kid called Alexa, then just change the settings and use the ‘wake word’ “Amazon” or “Echo”. Either that, or the people suffering from this problem didn’t bother reading ANY info about the Echo when they got it.
No way in hell would I use Alexa, “okay google,” or hopeless Siri anymore (the last not much of a loss, because it’s answer was invariably “sorry, I can’t help you with that right now”), because I’ve no doubt a server somewhere is saving info about what we say. Similarly, the Nest thermostats and smart home stuff—why on Earth would I want Google to have control over the heat in my house?!
Anybody who thinks the sketchy people who run those companies are on your side… well, I don’t believe they are.
I shocked! Shocked to learn that my smart camera and microphone can be turned on remotely without my consent or knowledge!
…Sir the mp4 file you requested….
Ah thank you….
BTW your microwave oven (turned off of course) makes an excellent cell phone garage…
Better turn off the phone also, or at least put it in airplane mode, or it’ll turn radio power to max in a desperate effort to find a cell tower. And that drains the battery fast.
I suspect that one of the reasons the manufacturers don’t let you set any wake word/phrase for their devices is the fear of what kind of words some people might use. They would fear the bad publicity that might result from YouTube videos of people activating Alexa with “Hey, Bitch!” or worse. It also prevents people from selecting words that are already used by rival products, which is important to maintaining brand identity as well as preventing confusion when several devices respond to the same command.
There are such phones. The Moto X, at least does. Mine answers to “activate voice recognition”. It’s a marketing choice, not a technical one.
“In order for them to work, they have to be always listening. Which means they could be continuously recording.”
A Libertarian teaching moment. Sadly, I had to return an Amazon Echo holiday gift from someone who is not as paranoid.
Some devices, like an xfinity x1 remote, are activated by pushing a button. Unless this is just a trick to make people feel better, this would be a great way to deal with the concerns people have.