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Amazon Gets Alexa To Not Notice That Super Bowl Commercial

While Amazon’s clever Alexa Super Bowl commercial is getting widespread praise, the online giant also had to create some slick technology behind the scenes to stop devices from around the world from giving everyone their local weather forecast.

The commercial opens with a woman in her bathroom asking: ‘Alexa, what’s the weather like today?’

Of course, in the commercial, Alexa has a cold and can’t totally reply.

However, the challenge was to stop the word Alexa from triggering Amazon Alexa devices in homes around the world where the game was on.

Amazon created acoustic fingerprinting technology that can distinguish between the ad and actual customer utterances, according to the company.

“The trick is to suppress the unintentional waking of a device while not incorrectly rejecting the millions of people engaging with Alexa every day,” stated Shiv Vitaladevuni, senior manager on the Alexa machine learning team in Cambridge.

When multiple Amazon Echo devices start ‘waking’ simultaneously from a broadcast, such as the Super Bowl commercial, similar audio is streaming to Alexa cloud services in Amazon’s AWS cloud.

An algorithm in Amazon’s cloud detects matching audio from distinct services and stops additional devices from responding, stated Manoj Sindhwani, Amazon director for speech recognition.

Amazon acknowledges that the dynamic fingerprinting isn’t perfect, but up to 80% to 90% of devices won’t respond to the broadcasts thanks to the dynamic creation of the fingerprints.

At least Amazon thought of this before airing the spot.

 

3 comments about "Amazon Gets Alexa To Not Notice That Super Bowl Commercial".
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  1. R MARK REASBECK from www.USAonly.US , February 5, 2018 at 5:55 p.m.

    Kinda like being....................married

  2. Chuck Martin from Chuck Martin replied, February 5, 2018 at 6:01 p.m.

    Ouch.

  3. R MARK REASBECK from www.USAonly.US , February 6, 2018 at 9:20 p.m.

    WAS!

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