Shooby Shooby Do Yah ... now Google ... Turn Bill's Lights Off

Introduction

I drove from Edinburgh to Glasgow last and had a merry chat with my car companion.

As I was driving I asked them to "Play Banana Republic by the Boomtown Rats on Spotify", and then asked, "Tell me the latest tech news". But I was alone in the car, and every command began with "Okay Google".

I must admit when a great piece of useful technology comes along, I love it. There is no button to press, and there is no looking at the screen, and it works beautifully. All I have to do is match my sentences to the ones that my Google Assistant understands. For just now we are in a learning phase, and she is learning from me, and I'm learning from her. The world, as far as I can see it, is moving towards one which has Alexa, Siri and Now Google embedded into it. I believe this will become one of the greatest steps forward in the true integration of technology and humans.

But, on the other side, we now have a little spy in our pocket, and she's listening to every single thing that you say. While her trigger is "Alexa ...", "Siri ..." or "Okay Google...", the agent is listening to every single thing you that say. If you have seen some of our reason IoT demos, we have a difficult conversation with Alexa, and we demonstrate how by working Porridge, she will trigger her listening process.

Now researchers in the US and China have shown that it is possible to run commands on Siri, Google Now and Alexa with commands hidden in songs:

This has been dubbed the "Dolphin Attack". Along with hidden commands in music, they found that the assistants will listen to high-frequency signals which cannot be heard by the human ear. Their proof of concept song is here.

Come and see it in action ...

If you have seen some of our IoT presentations recently, we have been demo'ing Alexa and Siri having serious discussions with us - they basically refuse to let us do the things we want to do, and tell us to go away. We are now working on new demos which focus fully on the risks of using Alexa, Google Now and Siri. Why not come along and see the future?

Here's a bit of fun with AI ...

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