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Comment by dev_north_east | Hacker News Reader

> I normally have it on mute because I find it activates and starts recording private conversations.

What?!

It can mistrigger on phrases like "take a left on" or "they got a Lexus". My parents have one and get a kick out of the misactivations.

Wow. I was under the mistaken impression that the devices were more robust than that.

I'm very anti these devices, now I'm even moreso!

For what it's worth, in two years our Google Home has only 'misfired' once, and that was when someone on TV said 'Hey Google'. It is in the living room and sees heavy use by a family of five.

> our Google Home has only 'misfired' once ... when someone on TV said 'Hey Google'

Is that a misfire? It reacted to the trigger phrase. Have you trained it to only react to your voice (I know that's an option for Google assistant, but I didn't do it for mine).

Amazon added a real-time sanity check, so if too many Echo devices are triggered with similar sounds within a few hundred milliseconds, it will ignore them. This was after some TV ads or shows had intentionally abused it.

Wow! That feels kind of insane, but makes so much sense.

Is this true? Triggering is done locally in the device.

But they can ignore/cancel the request server-side, so technically the detection triggers, but no command does.

I can't imagine how frustrating it is for folks named Siri.

You can at least change Alexa's wake word to a couple other options ("Echo" or "Computer").

One of my coworkers has a friend named Siri. When Apple's siri first came out somehow she kept getting texts from friends "remind me tuesday to call the doctor". She didn't realize what was happening so she kept track of those reminders and texted her friends back until everyone sorted their technology out.

Great story!

My roommate and I have a Google Home Mini in the living room, and to make the accidental activations more noticeable, my roommate set the accessibility "ding" sound for when it (thinks it) heard the trigger phrase. It gets activated a lot by television (maybe once every few hours of TV), and we generally have no idea what phrase accidentally triggered it.

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