← Back to context

Comment by gumby

5 years ago

One of the teens in the house has discovered you can say “Hey Alexa shut the fuck up”.

I’m afraid the joyless Siri just ignores you when you say that.

I actually really like that feature - it works with any _strongly-worded_ “stop” command: Alexa detects user annoyance and swiftly stops whatever it’s doing with the minimum of back-and-forth.

The best part is that whereas with most commands, if Alexa has any doubt about what you said or you weren’t clear it always asks you to clarify or disambiguate, even various stop/pause/volume-down/mute commands - but when spoken with an angry tone or with an f-bomb or two then she defaults to stopping without question, even if she didn’t hear you clearly.

I would like the Alexa team to reward politeness.

Like if you say "Alexa, please mute", you could unlock a new voice or a funny joke or something.

Ha, I've been doing the same thing with google assistant. Try it politely once, and then if it doesn't work or understand change to "shut the fuck up" and it somehow always gets it.