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Comment by sib | Hacker News Reader

Yes. In this case, the selection of a wake word ("Alexa") or phrase ("Hey Siri" or "OK Google") is driven primarily by performance (i.e., reduction of false accepts & false rejects). The folks designing these products know that, even though customers say that they'd like to customize the wake word or phrase, if the actual performance is significantly worse, those customers will not be happy.

We experimented with this extensively.

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If you can share, what kind of variation in F1 score were you seeing between different trigger words? I'd expect even within a single product family (i.e. Alexa/Echo/Amazon/Computer) there's probably significant variation.

I'd also be interested in the differences between a collectively-optimized wake word (without personal training) and one which the user personally trains against their voice à la the parent article. To what extent does that personal training supplement/supplant (or fail to do so) the "good enough for everyone" wake word kernels?

Nothing I can share, unfortunately.

But it's infuriating when you don't want to use the phrase and/or want to have a secret phrase. Better would be to allow customers to choose their own phrase and give immediate feedback, during setup, on how good it's likely to be.

There's such a difference, and it's so hard to find really high-performing ones, that you would be constantly telling customers, "that won't work well"...

We considered literally thousands of potential words. We also really didn't want anything like "hey" or "ok" to be required.

Note how long it took for "Computer" to be available - and you can imagine how many of us wanted that. I think it gives an idea of the difficulty.

Fair enough.

"Computer" should be the wake word, and everyone would be happy with that thanks to global, english interoperability in all places and contexts.

But thanks to the hubris of corporate branding and marketing departments we are unlikely to have this universally understandable command usable. Instead to use any light switch every consumer will need to ask what bloody set up the person has...

Alexa devices actually have "Computer" as an option. I did it for a while, because I dislike pretending a computer is a person ("Alexa") and I certainly don't want to address a company ("Amazon"). I ended up switching back to "Echo" after I realized that people in my house say "computer" too often for it to work well as a wake word.

Weak move by Amazon, "OK Computer" would have been so good of an option, also for being a small tribute to Radiohead.

The problem with that is that people use the word "computer" in natural speech far too often to make it useful as a wake word. You'll continually get false positives anytime someone in a sci-fi show says "check the computer" or "computer, tea, earl gray, hot".

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