Philip DeFranco brought up the new Burger King commercial on his show tonight. This new Burger Kind commercial engages Google Home, a smart home device, and is stirring up all sorts of reactions. Internet trolls edited the Burger King description on Wikipedia to say the patties include rat meat and toenail clippings after they found out that Google Home was using that description to answer the ad question. [View video to the right.] Google, on the other hand didn’t think it was so funny. It disabled Google Home from responding to that specific voice and question combination.
Google Home isn’t the first smart home device to interpret and act on speech accidentally. In January of this year, a little girl ordered a dollhouse and a box of cookies using Amazon’s Alexa. Thankfully, the parents were very good sports about it. Burger King could have easily gotten its idea from this mistake made by the little girl and made this new commercial. While there is clearly no malicious intention with this ad, it doesn’t remove the feeling of intrusion. What are your thoughts? Was it funny or creepy? Should the home assistants be better at distinguishing between video and real-time human speech? Or is it the advertisers that should be regulated?
I would love to hear your thoughts about the world’s fast-paced environment.