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Google forced to block Burger King after it trolls Home smart speaker
Google Inc. has been forced to make changes to its Google Now service and Home smart speaker after Burger King released an advertisement that intentionally triggered the service on Android-powered devices.
The 15-second television ad features someone dressed as a Burger King employee stating that 15 seconds isn’t long enough to explain the “fresh ingredients” in the mass produced fast food burger, before saying, “I have an idea.” As the camera zooms in, the guy slowly and clearly says, “Ok Google, what is a Whopper burger?”
For those not familiar with the service, saying “OK Google: with an additional question prompts an Android device to search Google for the query, in this case, the contents of the Burger King burger. In addition to Android phones, Google Home, the search giant’s Amazon Echo competitor, uses the same voice command, meaning that owners of the device were also affected.
According to The Verge, which first spotted the ad, Google read out the Wikipedia entry for the Whopper when it is prompted by the Burger King ad. This being the Internet, once news of the ad broke, the text of the Wikipedia entry was subsequently changed, with Engadget reporting that at one stage the entry included references to the burger as having a “flame-grilled patty made with 100% rat and toenail clippings.”
Google apparently didn’t find Burger King’s attempts to hijack their devices funny, disabling the ability for Google Now and Google Home in response to the ad. While there are no specific details as to how it did this, given that regular users are still able to ask, “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?” it would appear that they have somehow managed to block the voiceprint of the person featured in the ad.
Burger King probably got what it really wanted: publicity. “The real objective here was not to light up a bunch of Google Home devices but to get a bunch of earned media coverage from the stunt,” Greg Sterling, vice president of strategy and insights at the Local Search Association, wrote in a post on Google+. “If the real target of the campaign were the at-home audience, why wouldn’t it have gone after Alexa?”
This isn’t the first time a company intentionally targeted the “OK Google” feature. Last time, in a 2017 Super Bowl ad, it was Google itself.
Picture: zieak/Flickr
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