You don’t have to worry about your Alexa-powered speaker being woken up when Amazon’s 2018 Super Bowl ad comes on. Amazon has already released its 90-second ad that features the CEO Jeff Bezos himself alongside celebrities like Anthony Hopkins, Rebel Wilson, Cardi B, and Gordon Ramsay. Even though the word “Alexa” is said 10 times during the Super Bowl ad, Amazon assures users that their Echo won’t wake up and try to respond when it hears Alexa’s name being called out.
A spokeswoman for Amazon doesn’t say how this will be possible, only mentioning that the company does alter its Alexa advertisements “to minimize Echo devices falsely responding in customer’s homes.”
One can only imagine how many Alexa-powered speakers might be woken up when the ad plays during the big game and Amazon doesn’t build these protections in. It would not only annoying users but also flood Amazon’s servers with millions of simultaneous requests.
A Reddit user did some digging into an Amazon patent from 2014 last year to find out that the company transmits an inaudible acoustic signal to basically let Alexa know that it should ignore this particular instance of its wake word.
He ran Alexa ads through a digital audio editing software and discovered that the ads transmit levels of sound in the 3,000 and 6,000 hertz portion of the audio spectrum which is inaudible for humans. This possibly enables Amazon to simply tip off Alexa to ignore certain commands if it picks up on artificial gaps in the spectrum.
Amazon has said that it employs “acoustic fingerprinting technology that can distinguish between the ad and actual customer utterances” to ensure that its ads don’t wake up Alexa-powered speakers by mistake. So no need to unplug your Echo speaker if you don’t want to be disturbed by it waking up unnecessarily.