Quote:
Originally Posted by OtinG
Alexa is fairly successful at recognizing similar words to her wake word, but she seems to be very inconsistent about whether she verbally responds to a similar word as her wake word. Heck, sometimes she doesn’t even respond to her wake word. And each Echo device seems to be at least a little different in this regard with some doing better than others. It is Alexa’s inconsistency in responding that often makes her difficult to deal with.
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I don't claim to know the tech detail of how alexa works, but I would suppose the idea is that her limited local wake word detection power (turning the light on) would need to be fairly loose to be practical, then when an utterance is close enough to get passed on to her bigger brain in the cloud, there is another opportunity to analyze and decide whether or not it was really intended for her, before going on to process the rest of the command. That being said, lately I can stand right next to an Echo in a quiet room, and clearly enunciate (with no brogue) a simple Alexa command, and I won't even get a light. She can be bizarrely inconsistent on both parts.
But so can Google. I use my phone with "OK Google" detection enabled when driving, and once or twice during any audiobook, the narrator will say something that sounds almost nothing like "OK Google" and trigger the Assistant. And since my book player is set to rewind a few seconds when the Assistant interrupts,it goes into a loop, and I have either skip over those few seconds, or talk loudly over it for a few seconds to mask the detection.