Google has worked its magic so that Google Home no longer gets fooled by that witty Burger King ad that’s been making the rounds.
As you may have heard already, Burger King has released an ad that was specifically designed to trigger Google Home and Android devices to search for information online.
“Ok Google, what is the Whooper burger?” the employee asks in the 15-second post, saying that he doesn’t really have the time to explain it all.
Anyone with certain Google devices near their TVs, particularly those with voice activation on, that sentence will automatically have the device looking for what a Whooper is and linking to the Wikipedia entry for the burger.
This is the first time such a campaign is launched, and it was done without Google’s involvement, hence the company’s scramble to make sure it doesn’t work anymore. It’s not even clear how Google even managed to do this, but the consensus is that it fed the ad’s audio to the neural network, blocking it from returning results.
Wikipedia affected by campaign too
The ad has also caused a row on Wikipedia. Ahead of the ad rollout, folks over at Burger King tried to make their Wikipedia page more appealing. More specifically, they apparently tried to change the site’s description of its Wooper to include nicer words, the kind you get from an ad agency.
Wikipedia editors reverted the entry to the previous definition, taking out the ad copy.
The campaign has sparked quite a reaction online too. Some have expressed their amusement with the situation and even pity for Google Home owners, while others have rightfully slammed Burger King for trying to hijack their devices to search for information on their burgers as a marketing campaign. Truth be told, this is the type of thing that, while amusing to some extent, can get irritating quite fast.
