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by gumby 1808 days ago
One of the teens in the house has discovered you can say “Hey Alexa shut the fuck up”.

I’m afraid the joyless Siri just ignores you when you say that.

3 comments

I actually really like that feature - it works with any _strongly-worded_ “stop” command: Alexa detects user annoyance and swiftly stops whatever it’s doing with the minimum of back-and-forth.

The best part is that whereas with most commands, if Alexa has any doubt about what you said or you weren’t clear it always asks you to clarify or disambiguate, even various stop/pause/volume-down/mute commands - but when spoken with an angry tone or with an f-bomb or two then she defaults to stopping without question, even if she didn’t hear you clearly.

I would like the Alexa team to reward politeness.

Like if you say "Alexa, please mute", you could unlock a new voice or a funny joke or something.

Creating a better world, albeit one spy-device at a time.
We laugh, but in all seriousness, what evidence is there that Amazon is acting unethically with the Echo devices?
Counterevidence: some of them (perhaps all) have a hardware switch to mute the microphone, a requirement allegedly set by the CEO.

Parallel evidence: the Ring acquisition has aggressively integrated itself with police forces.

Partial evidence: some of the devices are known to retain data even after being reset to factory settings (I presume it's a bug).

It has to be listening all the time for its activation command and we have no idea what it's doing with the data that comes in and is determined not to be the activation command.

I believe Google assistant has some optional mode where it makes children say please.
Hey Geo shut the duck up
Ha, I've been doing the same thing with google assistant. Try it politely once, and then if it doesn't work or understand change to "shut the fuck up" and it somehow always gets it.