Wow, this is a new DDOS attack vector. Get an ad on broadcast radio saying stuff like "alexa, order more milk", or "okay google, send a text to xxxxx".
Toyota ran an anti-distracted driving radio ad where they did this. The ad narrator says "Hey Siri, please turn airplane mode on." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqZBVTMrgFA
siri has itself trained to a single user's voice. I've never had anyone else's voice activate my phone with "Hey Siri". Admittedly, it usually takes me saying "Hey Siri" 3 times before it recognizes my voice, but I'm 100% certain a radio ad would get no response from my phone.
Siri is definitely not trained to a single voice. And yes, the car radio can turn it on. I've had a podcast discussion of Siri trigger it. It became such a joke that some podcasters have another phrase they say when they mean "hey Siri".
Since the iPhone 6S, Hey Siri is activated by a dedicated chip in the SoC. This enables low-power real-time detection of trigger words. Before, Hey Siri only worked with phones in the process of charging, because it was done with software, so a lot less efficient.
These voice-activated chips can be trained (as seen in a lot of other phones), but I'm not sure the software-powered Siri can be trained.
Just want to chime in and say that I can activate my girlfriends iPhone by saying "Hey Siri" in a girly sounding voice. It's trained to only her voice but I can trigger it. So it's not foolproof as you make it seem.
My wife's phone regularly (maybe once a month), starts listening in response to me saying something, which isn't even "Hey Siri", despite never training with my voice. My voice does not sound anything like my wife's.
So, I think the error rate is simply not low enough to make conclusive claims about what it might or might not do.
It would only work if the iPhone was plugged into power AND they had turned on the capability for Siri to be activated by voice, which is limited to when the iPhone is plugged in.
I know Android users might not understand this limitation, but there it is.
There's almost no such thing as a passive radio anymore... superheterodyne receivers are the norm now and they contain a local oscillator that can leak back out into the airwaves.
Directions require more than your satellite coordinates. Map services are frequently polling servers for traffic conditions, new tiles for the map, and so on. You'd hope that these can fall back gracefully but I wouldn't put it past them to not. If you activate airplane mode and disable your phone's cellular connection, even if your phone doesn't disable the GPS receiver, directions may stop working.
Works fine on my Android. I regularly lose cellular reception in the mountains, and it continues to work. Sometimes the tiles are low-res, but still readable. I would expect Apple would design around the same contingency, along with poor cellular service along more remote areas of the Interstate.
Android allows you to pre-save areas for offline use also, not sure if Apple does that. I don't have a mobile data plan on my phone, so if I need navigation, I just save the map area before I get off WiFi.
They do, although in my experience Google Maps is better at this. I actually find Apple Maps to be perfectly usable for everything, but always use Google Maps for directions to the boonies if I'm going hiking or something -- it's much better at caching tiles and keeping them around for directions back once I'm out there as well.
Children's advertisements did this in the 1980s in the US with pay-per-minute numbers. The ad would offer to connect children to Santa if they held a phone up to the television. DTMF -> 900 number -> profits.
> On January 1, 1965, miffed at having to work on the holiday, Sales ended his live broadcast by encouraging his young viewers to tiptoe into their still-sleeping parents' bedrooms and remove those "funny green pieces of paper with pictures of U.S. Presidents" from their pants and pocketbooks. "Put them in an envelope and mail them to me", Soupy instructed the children. "And I'll send you a postcard from Puerto Rico!"
This has been a running joke on the Verge's main podcast for the last few months. People have confirmed that "Hey Siri", "OK Google" "Hey Alexa" and "Hey Cortana" all work on their respective platforms when the hosts blurt them out, and can trigger various mischievous actions. And that's a podcast listened to by comparatively few people. Imagine the mayhem if someone were to do this on, say, the Super Bowl.
> Imagine the mayhem if someone were to do this on, say, the Super Bowl.
Imagine a pop star paying Apple to give their newest single free to everyone (a la Songs of Innocence), and then a 10-second Super Bowl ad that's just "Hey Siri, play ___" with a dancing silhouette.
There was a Dilbert animation with Wally using a new voice-controlled interface. Dilbert comes up behind him and says "You know, it'd be a shame if this thing were to accidentally DELETE FILE!!!" and walks off.
The idea of this vector has been around for a while.
I recall an apocryphal story about a demo of a voice-controlled OS from the 1990s. The idea was that in the middle of this demo someone shouted out a sequence of destructive commands, like
I've thought it would be interesting to ask everyone to shut off, or at least put their phones in airplane mode during a presentation... wait a minute then "OK Google find me penis pictures" or something similar for Siri...
>Wow, this is a new DDOS attack vector. Get an ad on broadcast radio saying stuff like "alexa, order more milk", or "okay google, send a text to xxxxx".
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You can change the default from alexa to something else.
Google Now takes the user's voice into account during setup and usually responds only to the user's voice. Such a system should have been implemented in Echo too.
Whom are you fooling? There's a 50/50 chance your PIN is the same as the combination I use on my luggage. And if the PIN is also by voice, a picking a popular PIN will bypass the check for a good fraction of users, particularly if you get 3 tries or something.