Written like that Google suddenly looks like geniuses.

At least in the naming, sure. Everything else, not so much. I had to switch my whole house over to Echos because you can't change the wake word on Google Home. Every time I said, say, "Hey Google, turn the bedroom lamp off", the Home in the bedroom would say ok and turn the lamp off, both phones in the room would activate and complain that they didn't have a device named lamp listed, and every other Home in the house would start talking about how it couldn't hear me clearly. Then you yell "Hey Google, shut the fuck up!" and the blasted things start whining about how they "have feelings too" and I shouldn't be so rude. Few technological problems have made my fingers ache more for a sledgehammer.

Were these devices given to you, or did you buy them?

A mix of both for the Google Home devices. The Echo dots I got on a black friday for like ten bucks a piece.

You can't change the wake word because a separate, dedicated chip is listening for it and is not connected to the rest of the device except to wake up the main processor.

Then they could at least provide more than one option. Though while far from perfect, one of the things I like about Alexa/Echo more than the ability to change it, is that with multiple devices you will generally only trigger one (the others within earshot will listen and then ignore it once one of them has picked it up; works well in my house at least apart from one place where echo/reflection sometimes causes one in another room to get preference, but even then only one device usually triggers). Sounds like that was the main problem for GP.

Most of the time I can just turn in the general direction of the device I want to "listen".

Yep. Echoes also don't make you pause after the wake word, so you can actually talk to it naturally. Also, when you tell them to shut up they shut up. The way Google Homes throw a tantrum when you're rude to them will make you want to reach through the cable line and strangle the arrogant son of a bitch who OK'd something that pointlessly infuriating.

I've found that my Home Mini works best if I don't pause after saying the wake command.

Seriously, what the hell were they thinking? If I'm so frustrated at a device that I'll tell it to shut up, the last thing I want from it is more noise.

I've read a few times about the concerns people have with voice assistants, which all predominantly default to female voices, taking orders and abuse without question. I believe Cortana was also intended to "stand up for herself" in these situations, to avoid making it seem okay/normal to bark abusive orders at a "woman".

Great idea. When an aggressive man starts hurling verbal abuse at a robot with some female traits, let's antagonize him further with woke rhetoric from the safety of a remote datacenter.

With that sort of reinforcement, his next unfavorable encounter with an actual human female will surely end well.

Does nobody even try to de-escalate situations anymore? The most advanced AI in the world can't slink away quietly, wait until he calms down and try to correct these sorts of behaviors by promoting the idea that he'd slay it in bed, lose weight or grow a monster dong if he read this self-help book (now 20% off!) about treating women with respect? An incorporeal AI with goddamn control of a smart home can't walk through a hostage negotiation playbook to manipulate a violent occupant into submission? Clearly domestic violence is an impossible problem to solve.

It pains me to see people (usually women) encouraging vulnerable women to "stand up for [themselves]" in situations even armed male cops won't approach without backup from other armed men. It's sociopathic-- on par with teenagers encouraging other kids to commit suicide.

The second my computer starts talking back to me is the second I throw it in the garbage.

Google removed the need to pause after saying the wake word years ago. (Possibly you haven't disabled the acknowledgement beep)

IIRC it always worked without the pause. Just the beep was picked up by the microphone and made the recognition for that word or two much worse. It would clearly react to things said before the beep.

Google devices function the same way when configured properly. The mention of multiple devices responding, and some not knowing about the light, makes me think GP has something set up incorrectly.

Not "because".

Dedicated wakeup chips can be designed to have a different matrix shoved in for the word they're detecting. Google presumably did not do this, but they could have.

Adding more communication between the main chip and the wake-up chip would leave more room for privacy intrusion.

It's not more communication: it's different read-only data in the wake-up chip.

Considering how warm Google Homes stay even when idle I seriously doubt the main processor is ever going to sleep.

Heat is dissipated when electricity goes unused too (usually by dumping it in some load resistor) so it’s possible the extra electricity is just generating heat, waiting to go to the processor. I’d lol if they have 5v coming in, and they’re stepping it down to 3.3v for the wake word processor (hence heat) while the main processor runs at 5v.

>Heat is dissipated when electricity goes unused too (usually by dumping it in some load resistor)

This isn't true. Your light switches do not heat up to lightbulb temperature when the light is off. Heat is only dissipated when electricity is "used", more or less by definition. You seem to be describing a linear voltage regulator, which does have a load resistor and is wasteful if the step-down distance is large, but no modern electronic circuit would use such a thing in a power supply - it would use a switched-mode buck regulator instead.

Switch mode power supplies don't waste that degree of energy when doing nothing. That's multiple watts, probably at least 5 judging by the temperature, just being pissed away at all times.

They could just have a transformer that doesn't need a resistor for stepping it down

I guess that's why laptops batteries last exactly the same whether the computer is idling or not. Also, the reason they get very hot when you're not doing anything CPU intensive - it's all that unused electricity going to the dump load resistor!

I doubt that's burned into hardware so it just should have the option to update the fingerprint of the word

Uhm why is that chip not programmable for any ofher catch phrase?

That would require more communication between the main chip and wake-up chip which could lead to privacy concerns.

You're installing a box that has a mic sending things you say intentionally and unintentionally (because it thinks you woke it up) to a megacorp. I think privacy is out the window by now.

That's interesting, I did some digging into Apple device communication and it turns out they have a protocol called CompanionLink that handles this exact circumstance - devices can communicate securely with each other and decide who is going to handle the Siri activation - HomePod's seem to get preference, then phones then laptops. I'm surprised Google hasn't done something similar.

They do. You also get occasional feedback notifications asking you to confirm that the device that answered is the one you expected.

More than one should never answer. I wonder if location is misconfigured on individual devices, but I wouldn't bet against a bug.

It’s hard to infer the cause, but I wonder if the devices were set up under different accounts or not set within whatever Google defines as a home

I have no idea how things work under the hood, but this doesn't match my experience as a user. If I'm in the bedroom and ask to turn the lamp off, and phones are around, the phone screens sometimes lit up as they are listening to the command, but then only the bedroom Google Home actually executes it, while the phones turn their screen back off without saying anything.

Unfortunately I'm with the other guy. We have a Nest Mini in every room, and a Hub Max (only paid for 2, another 2 were free with Spotify and the Hub Max was an Instagram giveaway win).

We have to whisper to the Hub Max in the kitchen, from 3 inches away, and the Minis in the dining room and living room often still hear. If I don't whisper, even the ones upstairs hear. Sometimes I get 2 timers for my cooking, sometimes I get one on the wrong speaker. Then I try to cancel the timer, and the Hub Max hears instead and tells me I have no timers set.

The Hub Max asks on the screen if the wrong device responded. It clearly ignores your response, as the wrong device also responds the next time. I have pressed that button easily over 50x before I gave up and stopped.

Something clearly changed ~6mo-1yr ago because they never used to be this bad. It used to be that they would all listen, then only the closest one (that heard the command the loudest) would respond. Problem is, when I'm cooking the Hub Max is 1ft away and the rest are through (often multiple) walls metres away from me.

Jesus, they seem pretty sensitive to voice. Do they tell you not to be rude when you're having "adult time"?

They'd know. They'd know.

The developers of these things need to stop treating people swearing at them as a time to lecture them and instead realize that if someone is swearing at it then they’re probably not satisfied with how it’s functioning in the attempts before that.

Alexa backend treats user swearing the same way it treats a repeated command or other negative feedback.

And how is that?

I assume they capture the conversation for 'manual review' and upload it to an S3 bucket to languish for eternity.

Glad someone is, been trying to figure out if there was a command in Siri to communicate I'm dissatisfied with how its wasting my time with the past query attempts, no luck so far although I've basically given up using the thing at all at this point.

The amount of times where I would ask 3 times and have to do the task myself anyway were too often.

Funny enough Google Assistant on Google Maps does this just fine. When it asks me if I wanted to navigate to the Pizza Hut that's five miles away or the one that's 38 miles away, it understands "the closest one, you stupid piece of crap" just fine.

Haha I wrote a HN comment years ago about the same issue. Everytime "do you want to go to the Wegman's 5 miles away or the identical Wegman's that's 20 miles away?"

I can see this being useful. There are multiple Krogers and Walmarts where I am. They vary greatly in quality and selection. Depending on where you are and what you want to get, you might not want the closest one.

But 95% of the time, they’ll just want the closest one. It’s a sensible default.

This only happened to me once, but I was leaving BWI airport and asked Google to drive home. I really only needed a bit of help getting onto I-70 because some of the signs were confusing. Well it started navigating and after a few turns, it definitely seemed off. Turned out it was taking me to a Home Health place. I've always been super careful since then to make sure Home was Home.

Well, you've chosen convenience over time and here you are.

You have to make sure the phones use the same Google (family) account as the Home.

> At least in the naming, sure.

https://goomics.net/239/

If this means you set each echo with a different wake word, you probably don’t need to do that. As long as each one knows about the other (same account) they choose a single device to respond based on the one which heard you best.

Google should have done that too, but it seems you might not have had them all part of the same home (or something else was broken/buggy).

Well, the verbification of the word google introduces its own difficulties there.

The ideal would be for the voice assistant to have some completely unique word, ideally with sound combinations that are very rare in your native language. And if for some reason, that still doesn't work for you, have a way to change it. Or maybe just not have a default, and require users to pick their own keyword.

> Computer! Earl Grey. Hot.

I can't think of many words that rhyme with computer so would get picked up.

Muh brand identity/recognition though.

There aren't many legitimate ways to have people audibly self hypnotise themselves using your brand.

It's very black mirror.

My roommate had an Alexa and we changed the wake word to computer... Didn't last long. Apparently the word computer comes up on casual conversation much more than you probably think.

Welcome to the life of someone actually called Alexa.

"you should google that!"

" I don't understand your query. "

Ok Google, Google "Google"

The 21st century version of Buffalo buffalo buffalo...

In English, there’s only one word in the entire language with a ts sound (pizza) that’s not at the end. They probably could have come up with a name utilizing that fact, making wake words super “easy” to recognize and hard to accidentally say.

Just off the top of my head, depending on accent or dialect: "spritzer", "waltzer", "Mitsubishi", "matzos", "mitzvah".

A fun code challenge! I started with https://github.com/Alexir/CMUdict/blob/master/cmudict-0.7b as a list of words with pronunciation. It has:

  PIZZA  P IY1 T S AH0

Looks like I can search for " T S " to find the "ts sound that's not at the end"

  % grep " T S " cmudict-0.7b | wc -l
       991

Some of the non-proper nouns include ACCOUNTANCY, ANTSY, and ARTSY. I'll assume this is too close to the end to count, so require two sounds after the " T S ":

  % grep -E " T S [A-Z0-9]+ [A-Z0-9]+" cmudict-0.7b | wc -l
       853

These include: bestseller, blitzkrieg, boatswain, bootstrap, chutzpah, craftsman, draftsmanship, footstep, hotspot, itself, jetstream, outscore, outsell, outside, postscript, shirtsleeve, shortstop, sportsmanship, statesmen, tsar, tsunami, whatsoever, yachtsman, and zeitgeist.

(It doesn't have "spritzer" in the list, and uses the spelling "matzoh" instead of "matzo". I didn't look for a more complete list of word pronunciations.)

Finally, two words with two occurrences of the "ts" sound, neither at the end:

  % grep -E " T S .*T S " cmudict-0.7b
  ITSY-BITSY  IH2 T S IY0 B IH1 T S IY0
  TSETSE  T S IY1 T S IY0

"Zeitgeist" seems like a bug, I've never heard anyone pronounce the leading 'z' as 'ˈts' in English, and doing so as a non-German might even be seen as 'over-pronuciation'.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zeitgeist#Pronunciation gives two pronunciations:

Pronunciation (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA(key): /ˈtsaɪtˌɡaɪst/, /ˈzaɪtˌɡaɪst/

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/zeitgeist also gives two: ˈtsīt-ˌgīst ˈzīt-

I tried to get statistics from listening to https://youglish.com/pronounce/zeitgeist/english? but found I have a hard time distinguishing the two forms.

"boatswain" should be pronounced "bosun".

You're right. Though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boatswain says "formerly and dialectally also /ˈboʊtsweɪn/ BOHT-swayn", the dictionaries I checked do not list that alternative.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/boatswain even comments:

> Phonetic spelling bo'sun/bosun is attested from 1840. Fowler [1926] writes, "The nautical pronunciation (bō'sn) has become so general that to avoid it is more affected than to use it."

Most of the examples you gave are compound words, or made through suffixes and who knows, maybe my Russian teacher told a lie!

It certainly seems your Russian teacher wasn't fond of schnitzel nor seltzer.

I was literally laughing so hard from this comment. Thanks for brightening my day.

Seems implausible.

~ Fatso

~ Pitstop

~ Katsup

~ Yachtsman

~ Scotsmen

~ Batsman

There don't seem to be many, admittedly.

That fact seems dubious, does tzatziki not count?

Is tzatziki the only word that both starts and contains, but doesn’t end, with ts sound?

tsetse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsetse_fly

Tzatziki, Tsetse and Tzar are not English words; OP said there was just one English word (which he identified as "pizza", which isn't an English word).

It has foreign roots but it's surely an English word by any workable definition.

And "tsetse" has been used in English for nearly 100 years longer than pizza - the latter only really introduced because of Allied soldiers sent to in Italy.

Google Ngram says it wasn't until the 1970s when "pizza" was more commonly used than "tsetse." https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=tsetse%2Cpizza... . Or from BoingBoing today, "North Americans feared and misunderstood pizza in the 1950s" - https://boingboing.net/2022/11/21/north-americans-feared-and... .

That is trivially not true.

Is it just me or does anyone else find saying "OK Google" a bit of a tongue twister?

That's one reason why "Hey Google" was added as a valid wake phrase (and is the one I use)

For me, I apparently say "Hey, go [get, find, etc]" a lot and my phone wakes up unnecessarily. It seems to also happen with "Let's go". It's pretty annoying.

Until you want to ask google about googols

Wait, it wasn't a good idea to name my daughter "Google"?

Man I wanted so badly for Cortana not to be a big pile of garbage.

Incidentally, "Hey Boo-boo" a la Yogi Bear also works on Google Home.

Cylde is notably the only male assistant. I guess Discord know their customers.

I guess Bonnie isn't ready for release yet.)

> Cylde is notably the only male assistant.

Siri defaults to male in some countries and languages.

According to Siri: “Animals and French nouns have genders, I do not”

Siri does not have a gender, and defaults to a masculine voice in many countries.

Can't be that well, it's not an underaged anime girl.

This kid will have a bad time trying to create a Google account in the future

https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2019/07/03/google-...

Now every time it fails people will hate “Google” :)

I am still waiting for someone that lives in a household with a human named Alexa in California to sue Amazon for recording without consent.

Facebook: www