I am surprised this is how we have ended up. We have already had a pretty good looking model for this sort of voice activated computer interaction thanks to Star Trek: TNG.

It would be far more palatable for the devices to wait for a command cue ("Computer--") to respond with an activation bleep. After the bleep, the commands begin to be interpereted.

Instead we have a listener always awaiting commands. What could be a helpful and invisible servant is instead some kind of jerk who interjects with the most literal interpretations of normal conversations.

If I wake up in the morning feeling grumpy (every day) and say some crazy crap (totally possible) on my way to the can, will an apple contractor employee be able to figure out what the hell I really wanted by reviewing the seconds of audio?

I have made death threats to wall hanging photographs in those 30 minutes before my medication kicks in. There is no checkbox for this in the privacy settings. I know with some of these smart things you can change the prompt, but this feels like not the best we can come up with.

> command cue ("Computer--") to respond with an activation bleep

This can be turned on in the Home app → Accessibility → "Play start sound" (as well as "Play end sound").

> Can confirm. My alexa went in the drawer after she was offering to call the crisis line for me during a spirited session of gaming.

Wait, what? Please explain more.

It feels like you're saying Alexa heard you being ... passionate, and got concerned. But my understanding was that Alexa listens only after the trigger word. I'm really confused by what you've said and wish to know more context.

If you've ever owned a device like Alexa or Google Home what he said isn't confusing at all. They trigger accidentally all the time. His Alexa simply triggered when it wasn't supposed to and then reacted to what he was saying. Given he was gaming it was likely something about killing himself or someone else.

Huh, interesting. I have an amazon echo. My problem with it is not that it activates when I don't say trigger word, it's that I have to try very many times to get it triggered (usually by speaking louder).

It's impossible for me to say with certainty if it didn't just interpret something I said as it's trigger. Nevertheless, I was playing Halo online and yelling about a match going badly, saying something to the effect of "we might as well kill ourselves, this match is just not going our way" while laughing, and Alexa interpreted it as me contemplating suicide, and offered to connect me to a crisis line.

Great, now we need another device recording all sounds so we can play then back to reverse engineer smart speaker behavior :(

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 :)

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.

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

Relevant

https://youtu.be/J9gUIhkzNDk

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.