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Everything after you say "Alexa..."

It's everything after the product thinks you said "Alexa".



That's probably one of the only competitive advantages of Bixby. That's likely not going to get misheard very often. Though I guess "OK Google" is probably hard to mishear, too.


The first thing I do when I set up a smart speaker is turn on the accessibility option that chimes when it's listening so I can tell when the mic is active.

Coincidentally, this is how my wife discovered and fixed a filler word habit of "Ok, good, well..."


As someone who works in digital marketing and SEO, I can't tell you how many times my google assistant thinks I'm talking to it during the course of my day. I really wish they would let me change the wake word.


Not so sure about that. Google has now become a verb, not hard to imagine false positives.


True, I imagine its false positive rate is higher than Bixby's. But I think the specific combination of "o-kay-goo-gull" probably doesn't clash with too many things; even when talking about Google. But my Alexa seems to pick up all sorts of words vaguely sounding like Alexa when I play videos.


So I’m sitting in my office, talking with a colleague…

“OK, Google patent 9,876,543 and see if we’re infringing.”

or if my colleague is named Alexa…

“Alexa, let’s hammer those idiots.”

I think the first would wake Google Home. I guess Alexa lets you change the wake word to ‘echo’ or ‘computer’. It would be better if it let you use something arbitrary like ‘Rumplestiltskin’

IP leakage or potential misunderstandings don’t seem so improbable to me. Especially if the listeners in (from OP Bloomberg article) in Costa Rica, India, or Romania aren’t au courant with “hammer those idiots” as English idiom in context.


"OK, Google it!"


I use the word google a lot in other contexts simply because they are a big company with lots of services, and they happen to make the (tech) news quite often. So only the word OK would have to be misheard. Bixby seems safer in this regard.




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