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.
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.
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