There’s been a lot of angry chatter about our digital assistants responding to commercials lately. A commercial saying, “Hey Siri” or “Okay Google” or “Alexa” invokes our now-omni-present “friends”. Many of these scenarios can be avoided due to foreknowledge that the “wake word” will be spoken but the AI doesn’t know this. So what can we do? One obvious solution has existed for decades and comes from a non-obivious place: amateur radio. I propose a human-imperceptible “suppression tone”.

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