
Burger King ‘O.K. Google’ Ad Doesn’t Seem O.K. With Google - aaron_p
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/business/burger-king-tv-ad-google-home.html
======
klez
Previous discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14101182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14101182)

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tmd83
I like the fact the ad managed to show the potential unwanted side affect of
such device in a manner that everyone understand. I do see the appeal of smart
devices and it has to start somewhere and all such start would be painful. But
with the issues of IoT, the rampant ignoring of privacy by big corp and govt.
alike, the lack of understanding of potential impact by even the
knowledgeable, the apathy of the masses makes it a very dangerous time for
some of these innovations.

~~~
WilliamDhalgren
The device really should implement speaker identification before accepting
commands, yeah. Seems like a task a machine learning focused company like
Google really should be able to accomplish.

~~~
CPLX
There exists a far simpler solution to this problem.

Just allow every buyer to give the device their own unique wake name.

~~~
untog
But there is a reason they have the wake names they have - they're unique and
don't sound like other phrases. I recall reading something about how Alexa was
chosen because "ah-LECK-sah" is a very unique sound. I strongly suspect this
is why we have "oh-kay Google" and not just "Google".

So if people have to choose their own, they'll have to choose one that is also
not easily mistaken. Something tells me that would be a very annoying process.

~~~
CaptSpify
I have friends who have an alexia. It wakes up to unrelated words on its own
all the time. How can a company like google or amazon know what words are
commonly used in a household anyway? protip: they can't.

It's not that they chose those keywords for uniqueness, they chose them for
branding purposes.

~~~
CPLX
Yeah and presumably to head off a million YouTube videos of people naming it
dumbass, then saying "Hey dumbass what's the weather" and so on.

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dandare
I don't live in the US and I never saw an ad for Alexa or G Home - and I have
a problem understanding how can they be useful beyond a fancy gimmick. Can you
seriously trust it with your pizza order even if you don't know what the menu
is and what you want? Then how many times a week do you order a pizza? Maybe I
it is just me being old, please educate me.

~~~
Negitivefrags
My fiance and I have just finished serving up a plate of food for dinner. We
go and sit down on the couch and want to start eating, but someone has to futz
around with their phone for a couple of minutes to get an episode of TV to
play while their food gets cold.

After getting a home one of us can just say "Ok google, play The Next
Generation from Netflix on the TV" while walking towards the couch. It plays
the next episode right were we left off yesterday.

One of us gets up to go to the toilet, normally it means screwing around with
the phone, and oh look, the chromecast disconnected from the phone so we have
to reconnect again. It's easy to spend a whole minute just to get the damn
episode to pause.

After getting a home it's just a matter of saying "Ok google, pause the TV"

~~~
danieldk
_One of us gets up to go to the toilet, normally it means screwing around with
the phone, and oh look, the chromecast disconnected from the phone so we have
to reconnect again. It 's easy to spend a whole minute just to get the damn
episode to pause._

Reality: if you have a slightly non-standard accent, you will be shouting at
your device five times before anything happens. While I could just have
pressed the play button on my Apple TV remote and be done with it (no fiddling
with a phone necessary).

Then there are all kinds of cultural realities that are apparently not
considered in Silicon Valley. My favorite five pet peeves:

(1) Our family name is 'de Kok'. Very often these assistants totally mess up
when I ask e.g. to call family (either they start complaining about dirty
language or literally search for 'cock').

(2) We are a multilingual family, languages used in our household are German,
Dutch, and sometimes English. None of these voice assistants work with
multiple languages. So, the only alternative is to choose one language and
stick with it. Unfortunately, if you choose English you are having a hard time
navigating in Germany, looking up a German TV program, or calling a Dutch or
German friend. If you set the language to German, you forgo looking up shows
on Netflix by their English titles reliably.

(3) Usability goes down the drain once you have kids. Voice assistants
typically do not work well when multiple people are speaking at the same time.
If you are lucky, they are just confused, if you are unlucky they start doing
whatever they infer from a semi-random mix of words. You cannot tell your
three year old to be quiet, because mom or dad has to tell Siri what to do. (I
use Siri sometimes, and our daughter currently likes to scream 'hey siri'
repeatedly when I use Siri.)

(4) Voice assistants are unusable in most environments where there are other
people.

(5) Voice assistants, especially in-house voice assistants are a potential
privacy violation. So, you have to ask people that visit you if they are OK
with your conversations being recorded (accidentally or intentionally) and
switch off the device if they do mind the latent spying.

tl;dr: voice assistants only work well in monolingual families where all of
the family members have a perfect accent and where none of your acquaintances
mind the privacy violations.

Edit: added some more annoyances.

Edit 2: heavy downvoting :/. Please explain why!

~~~
jorvi
Exactly this. And you're getting downvoted because it works for people in
their situation, so either you must be lying or you must be using it wrong.

~~~
tossaway1
Uh, or it just doesn't work perfectly in all situations or for all people.
That's true of most products.

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cool_shit
This is genius. The best ads do their work not in the 15 seconds they play --
but in the lifetime that follows.

Well done Burger King, after all -- what good is Google if you can't stand on
their shoulders, right?

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11thEarlOfMar
It is clever? Is it intrusive?

No.

It's Brazil.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_\(1985_film\))

~~~
afandian
Which bit?

(Agreed it's all becoming a bit surreal)

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jasonkostempski
Still waiting for a shock jock to say "ok google, show me pictures of naked
kids" during the morning rush. People will die scrambling for their phones,
but it will finally be the end of this silliness.

~~~
colemannugent
This is the example I use to show people the dangers of these kinds of
devices.

Every now and then someones device activates while I'm giving the example and
all the talk of, "But its so convenient!" dies pretty fast.

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Zenst
Firstly, if Google et all, allowed us as users to customise the name of our
assistant. That would be appreciated by all users. Alas they do not and no
sign they will either anytime soon.

Second aspect, they have no voice recognition tied in to these assistants and
that would curtail all this. Though not ideal it would be a high improvement
from what we have currently.

But until we have customisable names for our assistants, voice recognition,
then this and much more will carry on happening.

Do you have a landline and screen calls, well somebody could ring you up and
speak to your assistant currently, that is an issue still.

For me I don't see things getting any better until we have the above tied into
some additional user biometrics, be that array microphone tracking that is
checked with visual recognition of some form.

Though a cheap simple solution would be a watch with one button that you
pressed and spoke into and that was linked to the assistant. That would not be
hard and work much better.

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mirimir
This is a clever hack, and arguably appeals to a core Burger King demographic.
Whether they experienced it themselves, or just read about it. Because it'll
get shared and discussed. And the next time you want a burger, maybe ...

What's evil, I believe, is that ultrasonic cross-device tracking technology.
This was just cute.

~~~
bargl
This 100%. They are OBVIOUSLY using your device from a commercial in a funny
way. You know about it.

But apparently what we don't know we don't care about when you tell us and we
know but we can bury our heads in the sand.

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mrmondo
I think it's a great move to show the general public how insanely insecure and
intrusive the IoT and always-listening cloud devices can be. People brought it
to light with google and with amazon - nothing changed and unaware people
lapped up the devices, hopefully a demonstration thats more tangible to the
general public phones home (pun intended).

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afandian
It seems to me Google could easily mitigate against this by fingerprinting the
query. If anomalously high levels of the same fingerprint appear at the same
time, ignore it.

~~~
19eightyfour
Google did find some clever way to stop it working. The article says within
hours of the commercial being reported on, it had stopped activating the
device.

~~~
jacquesm
Easy to make an exception for that particular pattern but that doesn't stop
someone else from doing this again.

The more successful a medium is the bigger the chance that it will be abused
for the equivalent of spam. Burger King is acting like those two lawyers that
wrote a how to spam guide ('How to make a fortune on the information
superhighway').

~~~
afandian
Don't know what you mean by "that" in your comment, but fingerprinting all
requests (which they probably already do) and then looking for elevated rates
is surely a generalisable pattern?

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jacquesm
Good one, the simultaneous hits should trigger a block. Hadn't thought it
through.

~~~
afandian
Makes you wonder what else they could do (in theory). cf.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator)

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19eightyfour
I think this is totally fine by Google. "O.K. Google" would be a trade or
service mark of Google, and you'd need to obtain permission in order to use
this mark in an advertisement.

The way the ad depicts BK and Google "working together", to speak a favourable
description of a BK product, suggests some sort of Google endorsement for BK.

Without that endorsement being approved, it's right that Google would act to
stop the ad from suggesting or using an endorsement.

From my point of view, this is pretty risky for BK to do so. And either they
didn't understand the risks, or they knew the repercussion would not be
expensive for them, or they just decided to take the risk.

To give BK the benefit of the doubt from a strategic perspective, maybe the
thinking was, "We know Google will react negatively or shut it down, but that
reaction will also get coverage, and will promote talk of our ad even further.
Thanks Google!" Still, I'm not marketing person, but that type of thinking,
seems to me sort of like "poke the bear" for benefit, and seems quite bizarre
to me. I feel it's strange if that is really how marketing people calculate.

~~~
kuschku
The interesting question is if "Google" is even still a trademark of Google.

Considering many dictionaries list it as "to google: to search in the internet
with a search engine, e.g. Google® or Bing®", one could argue it has become
generic, and the invocation isn’t actually "O.K. Google: ", but "OK, google:
", using it as imperative form of a verb.

That said, this argument is today very silly, as it relies on the letter-of-
the-law interpretation, and wouldn’t fly in most courts yet. In a few years,
with "to google" being used more commonly, it might actually.

~~~
nix0n
This is something that Google is actively working to prevent, see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_(verb)#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_\(verb\)#Etymology)

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bitwize
There are radio ads running in Australia or New Zealand (I forget which) that
instruct Siri to turn airplane mode on. They are PSAs about texting or dicking
with your phone while driving, so I guess they're helpful, but still.

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MiddleEndian
That's not helpful in the slightest, people may have passengers or be using
their phone for something like GPS.

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stuaxo
GPS would work, but maps would stop working after a while.

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MiddleEndian
I guess I mean GPS in the colloquial sense. Stuff like
traffic/accident/closure information would also be lost.

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rocky1138
> “Most people don’t trust advertising, and having advertisers continually
> listen to what happens in our homes is scary,” he said.

Well then don't buy a fucking microphone that runs 24/7 in your living room,
you dolt! Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

~~~
cryptoz
That doesn't seem like very useful advice.

Don't visit any of your friends who have bought it.

Don't go out in public.

Don't be a part of society.

Don't even SMS or email anyone since they might have one too.

The fight to reduce surveillance must happen even when the people who are
fighting for privacy don't purchase the products that everyone else buys. If
99% of people have bought Google Home in the future, what good does it do to
tell someone "hurr durr don't buy it?" No good at all.

~~~
rboyd
I mean, he has a point. I'm all for fighting for privacy but what good does it
do to pretend we're winning? We're losing / already lost.

~~~
rexpop
Or, perhaps, that is part of the story of submission we're fed as propaganda.

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_pmf_
Oh boy. But of course, autonomous driving AI will turn out just fine, right!

~~~
Cthulhu_
"All right _pmf_, I'm turning right!"

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nkkollaw
I don't know much about this, but when I set Siri up I think it does some
voice recognition so that I am the only one who can control the phone.

Couldn't the same thing be done with Google and Alexa?

During installation, one could add his own voice, and then your command
"Google, add this voice" would allow you to add another member of the
household.

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pebers
You can, although it seems to be well hidden on recent Android:

    
    
      - Settings
      - Languages & input
      - Keyboard and input methods > Virtual keyboard
      - Google voice typing
      - "Ok Google" detection
    

There are options in there to train / retrain the voice model by saying "OK
Google" to it several times, and then it should respond only to you.

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nkkollaw
Yes, I would make it like a first-run thing, that you _have_ to do it during
setup (like Siri).

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dandare
In my childhood I always imagined the word to active these devices will be
simply "Home".

~~~
lucb1e
Childhood-you did not consider the indoctrination effect saying "OK <company>"
multiple times a day.

\--

Sent from my someDevice.

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auvrw
[http://www.mtv.com/news/2592934/robert-downey-jr-on-
burger-k...](http://www.mtv.com/news/2592934/robert-downey-jr-on-burger-king-
in-iron-man-a-disgusting-lifesaver/)

汉保王 is, by contrast, wonderful

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dualogy
Ah well, just go with Cortana then.. =)

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tobyhinloopen
That is awesome and kinda scary

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lolc
I laughed. Who watches burger ads and has a Google Listening Device installed?

By the time this shit becomes useful, it will be able to recognize my voice,
like any good servant. And it will not be tethered to the cloud.

~~~
lithos
No company will give up an information vacuum in a busy living space. And if a
company did they would just get acquired by a company that would change the
software and TOS to become an information vacuum.

~~~
lolc
What do you mean by information vacuum?

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fixermark
A device designed to passively harvest as much information as it can.

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lolc
Ah ok. Yes it's our job to let these companies go out of business.

~~~
fixermark
Interesting. Why?

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lolc
Because it's an invasion of privacy.

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NKCSS
As soon as they can do good voice fingerprinting and add it to the device,
this becomes a non-issue.

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miguelrochefort
I'm sure most people are okay with it.

This is a clever trick. Get over it.

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tajen
They could have gone for "Hey Siri", but did they study junk food consumers as
Android users? [http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-for-poor-people-
ma...](http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-for-poor-people-maps-2014-4)

It's sad that Google just deactivated the phrase. There's so much potential in
playing with device-originated communications:

\- Siri and Google could work together a script to detect each other (usually
setup by users who want fun) and start an actual discussion, perhaps from a
movie, a comedy, etc. Bam! Movie advertising, and the surprise effect makes
people share it virally.

\- TV ads-triggered events could generate a health discussion next time the
person goes to Burger King, or detect friends who were triggered at exactly
the same time and suggest to start a convo about this particular TV show.
Would be fun if watching TV became a social experience thanks to Android or
Alexa.

At that point, instead of being triggered and filtering out wrong occurrences,
they could build something upon it.

~~~
matthewmacleod
Worth pointing out that the always-on `Hey Siri` on iPhones is trained and
responds only to the trainer's voice.

~~~
vidarh
The Norwegian submission to the Montreux comedy festival in 1983 [1] had as a
plot point how one of the characters got locked out of his flat because he had
a cold that changed his voice enough that it wasn't recognised by his building
security system. It'll take a long time before we have all of the kinks sorted
out...

[1] Happy New Century:
[https://tv.nrk.no/serie/montreux/fuha00005782/30-04-1983](https://tv.nrk.no/serie/montreux/fuha00005782/30-04-1983)
(in Norwegian only; it's set on New Years Eve 1999 - it's quite dated)

