The thing with voice based devices like your smartphone’s voice assistant software, or Amazon’s Echo or Google Home is that at the moment, they work on hotwords. This means that they activate when a certain word or phrase is used, like “OK Google”, or “Alexa”, or “Hey Siri”, and so on.
In the past we have seen how sometimes this can result in the device activating by accident, although in Burger King’s case, it seems that the fast food chain is looking to do it on purpose. The company recently posted a 15 second ad in which they try to talk about their Whopper burger, and towards the end of the video the camera zooms in on the guy in the video who goes on to say, “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?”
Now the good news for Android users who have enabled Trusted Voice on their phones, this trick did not seem to work with their devices. However for those who did not enable the feature, or for those who have Google Home which does not come with the feature, your devices will activate in an attempt to search for information on the Whopper.
While we suppose it is a bit clever on Burger King’s part and also a bit funny, Google isn’t too amused by this and according to Niv Dror who writes for Product Hunt, Google has disabled the voice command and it no longer works when the ad plays.
Google disabled the voice command for Burger King’s commercial 😂😂
(it previously worked) pic.twitter.com/xDWF4wDS1Z
— Niv Dror (@Nivo0o0) April 12, 2017
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