It sounds trivial but for me that’s a huge change that I wish Google would adopt. I admit that I don’t use Siri but I do have both Amazon and Google/Nest smart speakers in most rooms in my home. I find the Google AI a lot smarter than the Amazon AI but the one area where Amazon smart speakers are in my opinion vastly superior to Google/Nest devices is the wake-up process. I find the “hey Google” (and the “OK Google” alternative) wake-up phrases so clunky and cheesy compared to just saying the single word “Alexa” to activate the device. I know it’s a small irritation but it’s one that is the barrier one has to pass through at the start of every interaction so it is noticeable.
initially I thought that the use of a phrase such has “Hey Google” (or Siri) vs just being able to say “Google” (or “Siri”) was to make the wake-up sound more complicated and unique in order to reduce false positives but to my surprise that doesn’t seem to be the case in practice. I have an Amazon Echo and a Nest Audio right next to each other on a side table next to my sofa and when I am watching TV my Amazon device almost never false-triggers, maybe once every couple of months, whereas my Nest device, despite needing only a single word to activate it, false-triggers about once or twice a week.
If this rumour is true then let’s see whether Apple engineers can do as good a job as the Amazon engineers have done in terms of recognising a single-word wake-up command even in noisy environments while maintaining a very low false-positive rate.
initially I thought that the use of a phrase such has “Hey Google” (or Siri) vs just being able to say “Google” (or “Siri”) was to make the wake-up sound more complicated and unique in order to reduce false positives but to my surprise that doesn’t seem to be the case in practice. I have an Amazon Echo and a Nest Audio right next to each other on a side table next to my sofa and when I am watching TV my Amazon device almost never false-triggers, maybe once every couple of months, whereas my Nest device, despite needing only a single word to activate it, false-triggers about once or twice a week.
If this rumour is true then let’s see whether Apple engineers can do as good a job as the Amazon engineers have done in terms of recognising a single-word wake-up command even in noisy environments while maintaining a very low false-positive rate.
