Associated Incidents
Amazon’s Super Bowl ad will air this Sunday in millions of homes across the country. But no matter how many times Jeff Bezos bewilderedly mutters “Alexa’s lost her voice?,” no Alexa devices should turn on during the commercial, according to Bloomberg.
That’s because Amazon has taken steps to ensure that it doesn’t accidentally trigger existing Alexa devices when it’s advertising new ones, with the company commenting to Bloomberg that “We do alter our Alexa advertisements ... to minimize Echo devices falsely responding in customer’s homes.”
But while Amazon isn’t elaborating on how it avoids false positives during commercials, Reddit user aspyhackr may have figured out the trick Amazon uses here. Apparently, the Alexa commercials are intentionally muted in the 3,000Hz to 6,000Hz range of the audio spectrum, which apparently tips off the system that the “Alexa” phrase being spoken isn’t in fact a real command and should be ignored.
So, you can rest assured your Amazon Echo probably won’t interrupt your Super Bowl experience with country music (or Cardi B) — unless you go out of your way and ask for it.
Correction: This article originally stated that the 3,000Hz to 6,000Hz tone is outside the range of human hearing, which was incorrect information. This post has been updated to remove that information.