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Comment by ludamad | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone found Alexa way too easy to trigger? As someone who frequently talks about people with a similar name, I'm amazed at how often Alexa chimes in. I think 'OK Google' is at a sweet spot (although my parents for ages were convinced 'hi google' would work if they tried enough :)

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Don't have an Alexa so can't comment on how easy it is to trigger, although I don't know any Alexes so it'd unlikely be a problem for me.

What I can say about the google equivelent is that I find saying 'Hey Google' everytime I want it to do something is a bit of a mouthful especially if you want to do several things is shortish succession.

And my other problem is that I apprently say 'OK Cool' too often when I'm on the desk phone at work as my google account is full of recordings of bits of my work phone convo's where I've triggered it unwittingly.

Sometimes mine starts responding to... nothing. As in, in the midst of silence in the middle of the night, like a dog barking at ghosts, it'll answer a question literally nothing asked.

Relevant

https://youtu.be/J9gUIhkzNDk

Also relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeQD4UdGY-A

Id say yes. I just switched from google and feel like google was too buggy and slightly too hard to trigger. Alexa is too easy to trigger and has too many notifications.

"Hey Google" is a valid trigger for some versions of the assistant, so they weren't that far off and may have seen that in action before.

Pretty sure you can change the name she responds to.

It's a limited set of options though, like 'Computer', which is hardly an uncommon word.

For clarity, Alexa responded to my comments without being triggered. It's always listening (which makes sense, by virtue of listening for the trigger) but in this case, it reacted without the "Alexa" key word.

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