Pixies keep switching off my morning alarm, says Google Pixel owner | Hacker News Reader

Pixies keep switching off my morning alarm, says Google Pixel owner

theregister.com

68 pointscglong53 comments

Reminds me of how for the past few months Google Assistant regularly asks me "Auto read is on. Would you like to turn it off?"

The insecurity is grating. I explicitly enabled this. I haven't wanted to turn it off the last hundred times you asked. Can you take a hint? Or at least make no a valid response, not just yes I'd like to turn it off?

Just delete Google assistant. I assume that's possible on a Pixel?

It is not, the best you can do is try and disable it.

I think you can delete it by connecting with adb and uninstalling the apk.

That's like the most broken way to do it.

Instead go to "Google" app -> Settings -> Assistant -> General -> Switch it off.

If you're still paranoid, disable the "Google" app as a whole in app settings which will do what your adb stuff was supposed to do.

I thought it was baked into the Google app, and not shipped as a standalone apk

But I like that it reads texts to me while I'm driving. The whole problem is I don't want to turn it off.

If you want grating, tell a Google Home to "shut the fuck up" and watch in awe as it proceeds to complain about you being rude to it.

What even is the point of that? Imposing puritan values on customers or some nonsense?

The point is probably, by making the assistant more human-like, you'll grow more attached to it and use it more, depend on it. Perhaps even trust it when it suggests that you should buy this or that, or that it cannot open the airlock, Dave. Also perhaps some focus group showed that you need it to be more human-like so it doesn't scare off tech-adversies.

Or some random dude at google thought it'd be funny. But I put my money on it being used for improving some metric somewhere.

It may me throw all my Google Home pucks in the garbage can and replace them with Echo Dots. When you tell Alexa to cram it she shuts up.

The point is that some programmer (or probably PM) think it’s a better resource to custom program that response rather than to address fixing whatever the device did to make you curse at it.

I think this is an assumption that the device is right and the user is wrong. So chiding them on manners is thought to be the right product move, rather than using it as input for finding better device behavior.

They think giving their digital assistants a “personality” will endear you to them, without consideration of context.

> . I haven't wanted to turn it off the last hundred times you asked. Can you take a hint?

No. You are asking too much. Since at least 30 years, having a dialog window without a close button is considered bad GUI design, but for Google, this is normal.

Do we really need a third way to close dialogs? (Tap outside dialog, press Back)

That's actually the first way to close a dialog window. The ways you mentioned don't exist on all platforms and might not be desired behavior for all dialog models.

Someone in the Reddit comments recorded a video of it happening: https://streamable.com/qdhin3

This story was posted earlier this week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35778337

https://old.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/134so18/i_fina...

Relatedly, Apple has a feature which will silence your alarms when you look at the phone. Which apparently my phone thinks I do periodically while I'm dead asleep.

It's frustrating to wake up naturally and see the "Snooze/Stop" screen when the phone's dead silent.

I can commiserate, Pixel owners.

Why would the phone listen for commands while it's playing music? My iPhone doesn't do it, at least. Seems much more reasonable to me.

Siri will listen when music is playing; this is quite handy actually because you can say things like "make it louder" or "stop playing music".

Or what song is this

Does that work on any iPhone? I’ve never considered doing it on purpose.

Proper implementation should be filtering its own audio output stream out of the assistant mic input as it gets reflected back in.

Apple definitely does this. The homepod is pretty great at picking up a voice with loud music playing. But then it goes to Siri...

I'm not sure how you would do that. The audio it hears will be very different than the original waveform it is playing.

It needs to listen for the stop command.

I have an alarm that plays a song. I don’t want to listen to the whole song every morning so I stop it once I’m up and going. This is through Alexa though and Alexa repeats the song until you stop it.

It hadn’t occurred to me people might use voice commands for alarms. I press the button on my phone or watch.

I charge my watch at night so interact with my alexa 99.9% through voice.

I used to rely on getting out of bed to switch it off manually but over time found I didn’t need to do it.

Wouldn’t it be possible for the phone’s listening to ignore anything it, itself, is playing?

I seem to recall there was an ad for Xbox One that had it say "Xbox on" or "Xbox record that" or something, and when the ad played nearby, the Xbox (through Kinect) would pick that up and act accordingly.

2035: "This is an alert from the emergency broadcast system. Whatever you do, do not say 'Siri, create a paperclip maximizer'.... What, what do you mean that every phone that heard that message is now attempting building a paperclip maximizer BROADCAST TERMINATED

I'm surprised no one's made a song with the lyrics "Alexa, purchase <album name>... yes".

https://xkcd.com/1807/

People did this back in the day. If you had the name "Xbox sign out" and people called you out in voice chat then Xbox signed them out of their system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWZLa4AnN5k

The Cookie Monster ads used to trigger my GF's Siri with "Hey Siri". I couldn't with my normal voice, but when I impersonated Cookie Monster it worked.

My pixel 7 keeps breaking the google assistant "Hey google" functionality. I have to go into settings, remove it as the "assistant app" completely, then re-add it.

Then it'll work for ~8 hours.

My phone(LG G8 Thinq) will occasionally turn Bluetooth and location off somehow.

This caused some of trouble before I figured it out, since I had taken those off the shortcuts tray, because there's never any times I want them turned off.

I want the opposite of a hardware killswitch!

Stories like this make me really miss, the "Reply All" podcast and its "Super Tech Support" segment.

I use this pixel feature all the time, it does make it a bit too easy to snooze the alarm though. You want a bit of friction.

The obligatory xckd:

https://xkcd.com/1807/

Does iOS have the same problem of not being aware of the sounds it's playing itself?

Heh, streaming radio could go all kind of wrong with this "feature". ;)

this is not a pixel problem, this is an operator problem. If you change your alarm tone to "ok google call 911" its your fault too.

Their alarm was playing a random song from a playlist. One of those songs happened to have the utterance "stop" near the beginning of the song.

Seems a bit much to expect users to review their entire playlist for anything that could potentially be misinterpreted as a voice command.

Doesn't the phone have voice cancellation and thus know what it's playing?

The existence of this news article says no.

"ok google call 911" is a slightly better song than "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--" imho

There is no "ok google" in the song. How can this reaction be the operator's fault?

I was wondering if the high pitched "ooooh" before the STOP would pass as "ok google" to the machine, but TFA reports that in the case of alarms it just listens to "stop"?

(still, not an operator error in my book)

Google in its infinite wisdom scrapped the need to say "Hey Google!" before stopping or snoozing an Assistant alarm with the Pixel 6

From TFA

Frankly, this has got to be one of the most unreasonable claims of "it's the user's fault" I have ever seen.

I feel like Lil Jon would be perfect for the song “ok google call 911”

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