Burger King Plays a Prank on Google

Have you heard of the Google Home speaker? It’s like the Amazon Echo, it's a little speaker that listens for you to give it voice commands, and then it'll do what you tell it to do. For example, maybe you want to find out more about taking care of puppies. You would say, “Ok Google, how much food do puppies need?” The Google Home recognizes that you're talking to it because you said “Ok Google”. Then it'll do a Google search for you and start reading the search results to you.

According to WikiNews, Burger King decided to play with people’s Google Home speakers with a new TV commercial. The actor in it said, “Ok Google, what is the Whopper Burger?” If you were watching TV and had a Google Home, that would make your speaker start reading out the Wikipedia article about the Whopper! It's kinda clever, but kinda scary too. Can you imagine the Google voice just coming out of nowhere?

Just a few hours after the commercial started, Google blocked it from activating anybody’s Home speaker. They reprogrammed the Homes to ignore the voice of the actor when he said that in the commercial, but anyone else could still ask their own Home to search it. Burger King went one step further, and created even more new commercials asking the same thing, and since they were new voices asking the questions, the trick worked again!

///Dylan

Source: “Google blocks home device from responding to Burger King commercial” Wikinews, CC BY 2.5, changes made.