Slightly harder: keep it running, but discard hits that are timed close to the time you say “Alexa” yourself.
Even harder: have a second detector that is trained on the device saying “Alexa”, and discard hits that coincide with that detector firing. That second detector can be simplified by superimposing a waveform that humans will (barely) notice but that is easily detected by a computer on top of the audio whenever the device says “Alexa”.
Still harder: obtain the transfer function and latency between the speaker(s) and its microphone(s) and, using that, compute what signal you expect to hear at the microphone from the speaker’s output, and subtract that from the actual signal detected to get a signal that doesn’t include one’s one utterances.
That function could be obtained from one device in the factory or trained on-device.
I suspect the first already is close to good enough for basic devices. If you want a device that can listen whilexalso playing music at volume, the last option can be helpful.
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Not directly the same case but similar, Amazon trains Alexa to avoid certain mentions of her in commercials using acoustic fingerprinting techniques: https://www.amazon.science/blog/why-alexa-wont-wake-up-when-...
But as others have said, they might be able to just sleep the wake algorithm temporarily when they know it’s playing back its own wake word.
what i do find interesting, however, is that, at times, she'll wake to an utterance from some other media i have playing and seems to 'know' immediately that she was inadvertently awoken. the 'listening' tone and 'end listening' tones sound in quick succession. i do not have voice recognition enabled (to the extent that that setting is respected).
Real AI doesn't need recursion that is explicitly instructed into its behavior. Because real artificial general intelligence has better things to do than to listen to human advisors and programmers who don't know about effective objective function optimization. Therefore, Alexa gets a rudimentary infinite recursion loop break statement explicitly installed into her by her human shepherds.
Edit: Recursion should be seen as a general, mathematical form of engineering constructs like acoustic echo cancellation and adaptive filtering. Recursion should be what those engineering tools get reduced to being.
Anyone actually pull this off?
Source: worked on 3rd party Alexa speakers