Donnerstag, 14. September 2017

‘South Park’ Screws With Viewers’ Google Home, Echo Devices

Fans of the show South Park who watched the season premiere last night got more than the usual fart jokes and foul-mouthed rants: Amazon Echo and Google Home devices were woken up throughout the episode, triggered by commands from the characters. Of course, hilarity — or headaches, depending on your point of view — ensued.

Before we proceed, it’s worth noting that South Park contains a great deal of extremely not safe for work language, so you’ll probably want to put on headphones, turn down the volume, and read this out of earshot of your boss and/or children.

In one example in the episode, Cartman conducts a veritable potty-mouthed orchestra, getting a group of Echo and Home devices to repeatedly trigger each other to say things about human genitalia.

For the most part, it seems viewers were pretty amused by the stunt, posting clips on Twitter showing their devices adding things like “titty chips” and “hairy balls” to their shopping lists, or setting an unwanted alarm for (gasp) 7 a.m.

People who owned both devices had double the laughs:

While others sat back and watched Alexa go (again, beware foul language):

Google Home was also feeling spunky, owners say:

We’ve reached out to Google and Amazon for more information on how this could happen, and whether the companies have plans to deal with these kinds of situations going forward. We’ll update this post if we hear anything back.

Of course, this isn’t the first time TV content has messed with voice-activated devices. Back in April, a Burger King commercial for the Whopper forced Google Home devices to chime in with information about the burger. Soon after, Google blocked the ad from triggering Home devices, but Burger King found a way around it again.


by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

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