Burger King hijacks the Google Assistant, gets shut down by Google

Burger King's ad invokes the "OK Google" hotword to advertise fast food; gets blocked.

Enlarge / An actor on a soundstage holding an exaggerated facsimile of a Burger King product.

Burger King made waves today after it released a TV ad that purposely triggered the Google Assistant. The ad ends with a person saying "OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?"'—a statement designed to trigger any Google Assistant devices like Android phones and Google Home to read aloud a description of the hamburger's ingredients. Google apparently wasn't happy with a third-party hijacking its voice command system to advertise fast food, and has issued a server-side update to specifically disable Burger King's recording.

Further Reading

Before the ad was disabled, the Google Assistant would verbally read a list of ingredients from Wikipedia. Of course the internet immediately took to Wikipedia to vandalize the burger's entry page, with some edits claiming it contained "toenails" or "cyanide." Getting the Google Assistant to actually read one of these false edits was a tough task, since the Google Assistant gets its data from Google's search index, rather than a live query of Wikipedia. Still, according to The Verge, there was actually a brief period when the Google Assistant would read a false edit.

 

 Google's shutdown of the feature is interesting. The ad will still wake up a Google Home—the "Ok Google" phrase will light up the device, and the little lights on top will spin while it waits for the query to make a round trip to Google's servers. Google Home will no longer dutifully recite the burger's ingredient list, though. Apparently Google has made changes so that Burger King's specific recording of the phrase will no longer trigger a voice response. Instead, the Google Home just quietly goes back to sleep, without any response to the query. Having a live person ask "OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?"' will still trigger a voice response, though.

Further Reading

Android phones are a little less susceptible to inadvertent hotword triggers thanks to a feature called "trusted voice," which aims to listen only to "Ok Google" triggers from the device owner. Android phones also don't have "Ok Google" enabled by default, giving Burger King a smaller target area. 

 

 

Google is working on a voice-based user authentication scheme for Google Home, which should shut down similar hotword hijacks in the future. Google Home would be the first Google voice product to detect and differentiate between multiple user voices on the fly—a task I think even some humans would have trouble with—so the feature is taking some time.

 

 The total time the ad triggered the Assistant was about three hours. Burger King is still on the hook to run the now-defanged ad on television, but we're sure the company already got its money's worth thanks to tech articles like this one.