I'd say top 100 for about the last 25 years makes it pretty common. What surprises me a bit is that it didn't fall off a cliff after Amazon's Alexa came out.
Yeah I wish I could change the wakeword. I moved to a homepod mini from echo dots for more privacy but it's annoying but being able to change it. I'd prefer one that's one word Iike.
Also bad that it won't check your email etc without an iPhone.. Not very happy with it in general but I love the yellow colour and I trust Apple a bit more for privacy.
One thing that is great is that it matches your own volume. If I ask a question quietly at night Siri responds in a very low volume whereas the echo dot just booms like it's daytime.
My Google home accepts being called a variety of things that aren't Google, possibly in order to accept different accents or slurring, possibly just because it's not very strict with exact sounds being used. I imagine this is actually a good thing if you're half asleep talking into the pillow, have an uncommon accent, etc.
I know it's not perfect, but if you use Amazon's Alexa and know an Alexa you can change the wake phrase to a few others (iirc "echo" and "amazon" are among the choices).
Our wake word is "amazon", lest we forget a major corporation is listening in to our conversations about who left the fridge open and whether we need to wear a raincoat today.
It’s not just a question of being a friend or family members name name. It’s also easy for a YouTube video etc to accidentally include say “Alexia turn off the lights” as part of seemingly innocent dialog that nobody building it thinks is going to cause a problem.
It's been literally years since someone saying Alexa on a TV show or elsewhere have triggered my devices. Occasionally I've seen them switch to "listen", but they've gotten good at not reacting.
I'm assuming part of it is that it's gotten very good at recognising who is speaking. E.g. my son and I tested the limits of it a while back by changing voices (it still correctly identified my son when he tried to change his voice), mixing and matching (I'd say "Alexa" and he would say "who am I?" and vice versa; Alexa would recognise whomever said "Alexa" irrespective of who spoke what followed). So it'll usually know if whomever is saying "Alexa" is a known member of the household, which would seem like a good indicator to increase the threshold for how clearly the phrase is spoken before activating.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly how Google does it (only matching voices on the keyword); my Google home will ignore anyone else saying "ok Google", however if someone's yelling at me from another room or talking on the phone in the hallway, it's impossible to get anything useful out of it; it'll activate on the keyword and start processing whatever the first sounds it hears (dinner's ready, ok, ok, ok; I'm leaving now; you've got a phone call; etc). Before I have a chance to tell it to pause my music so I can hear the person yelling, it responds to them, not me. Before I can ask for the weather, it responds to someone walking by on the phone that happens to say something just outside my door at just the wrong time (this happens often when you live with people working from home)
I'm guessing there's something about how they're doing recognition of who is speaking that would make it hard to scale the cloud based speech recognition. Though I also notice that Alexa can answer more questions with the network down than it used to. Early on it was pretty much only the wake words, and then it'd given an error no matter what. Now it "listens" and will answer some requests to some degree without a network connection (e.g. if you ask to set an alarm it'll tell you the network is down and it can't set new alarms, but that it will still alert you, so it'd seem the full smarts of parsing an alarm request goes to the cloud, but it recognises at least enough to know you've asked about an alarm)
The nice thing about "OK Google" was that it sounded a lot like "Cocaine Poodle", so you could imagine your personal assistant was a hyperactive creature of limited intelligence. Which honestly, sets expectations appropriately.
Except that when my business partner and I are talking to each other about Alexa, we have to refer to it indirectly, e.g. "the A-lady", to avoid triggering his Alexa devices (I don't normally have one active).
If our Google Home triggers accidentally its usually easy to think back on what we said and find the offending phrase. Siri, on the other hand, seems to trigger several times a day without any explanation.
My watch’s Siri seems to trigger when washing my hands, or sometimes when I am in the kitchen and somebody else opens the tap.
I was on a zoom call the other day, both of us using speaker (no headsets) and something trigger both our watches to say, “sorry, I didn’t get that”, in each of our languages. At least we both laughed.
Mine too, but I think you’re probably holding down the crown in the physical action of the washing. Your hands are bent in unusual ways and the back of your hand pushes up against the crown.
I don’t think it’s responding to a vocal ‘Hey, Siri!’ in this case.
