Sonic Siri

A Chinese research firm has discovered that all our our various voice assistants (Alexa, Siri, OK Google and Cortana) listen to frequencies well beyond the range of human hearing.  Therefore, if a malicious command is pitch-shifted above that range, our devices will hear it and execute it without any of us knowing about it.

Here's the video of it in action:



On the surface, this looks a bit scary: the parts are cheap, there are apps that will shift the frequency of any input (though it may need to be washed through the app a few times, but that's not hard, just time consuming).  And maybe it is scary, but there are some things that you can do about it.  Read on.

Voice Cliques

The big news from this last week in the Internet of Things is that Amazon and Microsoft are talking to each other.  At least, they are through their digital assistants.  You can now 'summon' Cortana through Alexa and vice-versa.

The big idea that helped these two Seattle area volcanoes of tech to work together is that their two assistants are good at different things.  Cortana integrates well with Microsoft Office and the Bing search engine.  Alexa is good at almost everything else.  This means that you will soon be able to say natural sounding phrases like, "Alexa, open Cortana. [pause] Hey Cortana, what's on my Outlook calendar for today?"  All from the same speaker thingy sitting on some shelf in whatever room you are in.

Not clunky at all.

Virtually Polite

I like my virtual assistants, be they "Hey, Google" or Alexa.  (I've not owned an Apple product since long before Siri.  As for Cortana, well she may be fine, but who knows?)  But they are not perfect.  Each has their own set of problems, be it interoperability with the apps I want to use or the trigger words that are used to 'wake' them up.  However, the thing that irks me the most about them is that they are only kind of polite.

By 'kind of', I mean that they follow the intent of polite conversation, but not the forms.  They respond quickly with relevant information (most of the time) if they are address correctly, but they do not handle words like 'please' and 'thank you' and 'you're welcome' with any grace.  Ffor instance, if you say, "Alexa, please tell me about the weather," then Alexa will tell you about the weather, ignoring the word 'please' as irrelevant to the request.  Then, after you have the information, if you say, "Thank you," you get nothing in return.  Instead, you have to say "Alexa, thank you".  Only then will you get a "You're welcome."  It does not fit into a natural conversation.  At least in the style of American English in the beginning of the 21st Century.

Prime Foods

Amazon had a good week last week.  There were a lot of sales on their various signature products (Echo, Kindle, Fire, etc) in lieu of Father's Day, they launched the Dash Wand with Echo so that you can 'say it or scan it', and they agreed to purchase the Whole Foods grocery chain for $13.4 Billion.  A good week indeed.

It is the Whole Food deal that I want to focus on.  As someone who has spent a couple of decades in a variety of retail positions, from floor sales to manager to vendor rep, as well as some opinions on where automation may take us, this deal raised my eyebrows and got me going, "Hmmm."  With that in mind, I read a few articles, starting with two from the Grey Lady:

• Amazon to Buy Whole Foods for $13.4 Billion
• The Amazon-WalMart Showdown That Explains the Modern Economy

Both articles are worth your time (if you haven't already read them), but the focus of both is too narrow.  They both only scratch the surface of why Amazon might have agreed to buy a brick-and-mortar grocery chain.  Yes, they have been dabbling with physical locations for the last year or two: Amazon Go being one and they now have a physical book store or two.  Yes, they want to take more market share from WalMart.  But to swallow a nationwide chain when they have been spending two decades destroying nationwide chains is a different animal all together.

What's In A Name

I'm going to step off the techno-socialist soapbox I've been using for the past few months.  Instead, I'm going to put on my old marketing gloves, open up the sales toolkit and do a product tear down.  Though, not really.  What I want to tear down is the launch of a product, not the product itself.

The item in question is the new Apple HomePod, announced last week at Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference (WWDC).  The HomePod is a package of tech that is roughly the size of that urn your grandmother keeps on the mantle.  The one full of your grandfather's ashes.  Only this one may be full of something else.  Something smellier.

To Echo or Not To Echo

As I've spent the last few weeks expounding on the 'trap' of automation as an economic policy, I've not commented on a few of the things that have been happening in the more immediate world.  I'm not done with the concept, far from it (read up on Techno-Feudalism, O constant reader), but I'll give it a rest this week.

Google In Da Houz!

I received my Google Home on Friday and have been messing around with it all weekend.  Overall, I like it.  I even like it better than the Amazon Echo Dot that I used to have (and still have as it is now up in my master bedroom on my bedside table so that we can whisper sweet nothings to each other).  But nothing, especially a first generation product, is perfect.

I'm not going to compare it to the Echo Dot (better speakers, adds Google Play Music) because tons of reviews have already done that.  Instead, I'll focus on the unboxing, setup and smart home control stuff.

Unboxing and Setup

The Big G is doing the same thing that all big tech companies do: making the unboxing more of an unveiling.  There is a text riddled sleeve that slips off to reveal a box with a tab sticking out.  (I added the Alice-in-Wonderland text, but I 'wonder' why Google didn't?  Not classy enough?)

Google Trust: Doubling Down

For the past two weeks, I've discussed the role of big data in my life, both as something to use with at least one eye open and as the terrain that my daughter must navigate as she grows.  And then October 4th happened.

On that day, Google announced a variety of products with most of the focus going to their new Pixel phones.  But they also announced their Allo messaging app, a new 4K Chromecast and their Google Home voice assistant.  It was that last that caught my eye.

Smart, Natural, Google Home

Let the Games Begin!

The last two weeks have seen some announcements in the home automation voice assistant space.  The big news is that Google bowed their 'Google Home' product, an answer to Amazon's Echo.  Apple also is rumored to be working on a home version of Siri with maybe a camera.  And, just for kicks, Amazon released an in-browser version of Alexa more to explore the concept than anything really earth shattering.

For the sake of brevity (a first for me), I'm going to ignore Apple's home assistant for now.  They haven't made any official announcements and the camera thing... well, even the rumors are a little unsure how real that is.  It would be nice for context on who is issuing commands so that I can over ride the MSD's requests, but the privacy issues may be too much for most of us to bear.  Enough on that.  On to Google Home.