Amazon Alexa gone wild

you can say it’s wakeup word, or you can press the dot button on top of the device, you can see the child pressing the button.

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I think it was, sort of. It sounded like 'Lexa to me.

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It could tell that mess was Alexa, but couldn’t understand “play Twinkle Twinkle”?

Or maybe it thinks tickle tickle is a euphemism for sex :wink: :flushed:

I suspect that was sort of “Alexa”. But i also think that @doerofthings above is correct that if it was responding to the child’s words then it was because of pressing the button.

Did a google search – incognito, of course – and found this article explaining half of it: http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/12/kid-gets-amazon-echo-dot-alexa-to-play-porn.html

The short of it is it comes from an album of “funny” (?) ringtones with search-engine optimized song titles. Somehow Amazon Music has access to that album.

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Porn Detected! (Porno Ringtone Hot Chick Amateur Girl Calling Sexy Fuck Cunt Shit Sex Cock Pussy Anal Dildo Ringtones

I heard “Porn detected! … Retro Hot Chick Amateur Girl … Pussy Anal Dildo Rains Down …” but I understood the kid just fine.

Seriously, I’m surprised there isn’t a safe search option. There probably is, but the parents don’t know about it.

Most of the time when Alexa doesn’t understand me, she just ignores me. The blue ring lights up and after thinking about it for a few, she just “nope, not even going to say anything.” After seeing this, I guess I’m glad she does. :cold_sweat:

Seems like the kid manually presses a button to get it to accept his commands - maybe that overrides the need to address it? Because his “Alexa” certainly isn’t intelligible. I believe you can change the name it uses, but that has to preface the command.

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Now this is how you get a toy to say nasty stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebv51QNm2Bk

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I am reminded of Heinlein’s Number of the Beast where the voice control gadget was wired to an inter-universe teleport device. Certain sequences of words, taken out of context could cause bad things to happen.

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?

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“Alexa, play digger digger.”
“Sure thing, buddy. Here’s some Hot Chick Amateur Girl Calling Sexy Fuck Pussy Anal Dildo.”

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Not according to Cory Doctorow, who believes these type of voice command devices are constantly transmitting everything they hear to the cloud, for nefarious unspecified purposes (something he has stated no less than 3 times here on BB). Never mind that it would be practically impossible to hid this data stream from anyone wanting to look for it.

As I said in my other post, it would not surprise me at all if the Echo Dot was LOCALLY buffering audio at all times, maybe the past 1 minute, and goes into “analysis and transmit mode” once it hears the string “Alexa.” Yes, this analysis may be happening on audio already captured locally, but not processed. Kind of like the NSA, hah! I really doubt they’re streaming all audio back home to Amazon all the time, and you’re right, it would be impossible to hide. What wouldn’t surprise me is if their EULA states that they reserve the right to do this, however, which really ought to be just as scary, because they can push the button and make the change, and have it affect everyone who already bought one that worked differently 3 days earlier, but all under the same EULA. Ugh. The technocalypse can be so hard to navigate at times.

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Why I probably will never get an Alexa:

I can easily see RatBoy the Elder using it to order himself the entire warehouse of Stikbots (his current obsession.)

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The kid probably just wanted some Scooter.

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It would surprise me. Most of these devices either play a tone, or have some sort of visual indicator that it is in voice command mode. Going back a minute, or ever more than a couple of seconds would serve no purpose. It’s why you have to say the wake-up word first, and can’t tack it to the end of your command. Hell, even on the Enterprise, you have to start a computer request with “computer”.

And as for flipping a switch to transmit everything, well, in the US most home internet isn’t metered, but in much of the rest of the world it is, and such a change would be detected immediately, and the bad PR is would generate is more than enough to prevent a company from trying (plus the fact that there’s hardly any business upside to it).

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Hey look what I just saw:

Instead of just seeing it, you should have read it. It only records the commands you make after saying the activation phrase. This is done to be able to improve speech recognition on a by-person level. Once again, these devices are not storing and transmitting everything you say.