The epoch of the AI agent is upon us . hokey personalities like Siri , Cortana , Alexa and others are finding their way into our lives . Most of the sentence , they help out by give us entropy or completing tasks upon our request . But sometimes they act up a bit and do something we did n’t expect , like lodge a dollhouse .
That ’s what Amazon ’s Alexa , a personal helper course of study find onAmazon Echoand related machine , reportedly did for some television viewers in San Diego , California . During a recent morning report on the CW6 News Station , anchors talked about a 6 - class - sometime Texas girl who used her parents ' replication to regularize a doll’s house and 4 pounds ( 1.8 kilograms ) of cookies . Then the trouble began .
While the anchorman report on the story , they apparently triggered several Echo devices owned by people watching the report on television . Below is CW6 ’s report on that initial account :
The affected machine dutifully put in an order for a dollhouse . The dollhouse material land market have a abbreviated boom . There ’s no word on how many , if any , of those orders plump through as actual purchases .
The humourous story illustrate the challenge troupe face when designing voice - activated digital assistants . Amazon ’s strategy is to enable online purchase through Alexa by default , which take sense from Amazon ’s perspective . multitude can change the options on their Alexa - enable devices to take assay-mark before make a leverage , but that responsibility falls to the owner , not Amazon .
I can report that Google Home sometimes oppose to audio from television , too . I own a Google Home machine , and it has shrill up a few clock time while I was watching something on telecasting . Fortunately , it has yet to send any orders . consider that I ’ve been see a lot of “ It ’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia , ” I am thankful for that . The uncollectible I ’ve experience is Google Home protest that it did n’t understand what it thought I was saying .
A more sobering facial expression of this story is the realisation that these devices are always listen to what is happening within an environs . They have to listen for answer when you give the command phrasal idiom . doubt remain as to how much of our conversations are cached in the memory of these twist and how secure the gadgets are from hackers . It ’s not hard to imagine a ill secured AI agentive role effectively transforming into a microphone that record everything go on in your house . Wired fly the coop agreat storyon this very issue in December , in cause you ’re interested in doing some further recital .
Perhaps in the future we ’ll see more troupe deploy authentication strategies by nonpayment to keep accidental purchases or other unintended legal action . For example , it would be awkward if your AI assistant ordered a hack for you every prison term it hear someone on television doing so . Or perhaps we ’ll see improvements to sound acknowledgement technology so that these devices can tell the difference of opinion between their owners and other spokesperson .
In the meantime , it ’s a good idea to research any gimmick that uses voice activating before you adopt it . For some masses , the likely impact on privacy might be too capital for comfortableness . For others , a few surprisal dollhouses might be a small price to pay for digital assistance .
