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But let’s see where it comes from.
For the past few years, you’ve been able to say “Stop” to tell the Google Assistant to end an alarm early without having to precede your command with “Ok Google.” It’s a useful feature that Google first debuted before releasing it later on Pixel smartphones. And for the most part, it works like a charm, although one person recently discovered a fun quirk of the feature that includes the Pixies classic “Where Is My Mind?”
In a Reddit post spotted by , Pixel user ‘asevarte’ explains how his morning alarm would go off and sometimes go off moments later for seemingly no reason. “Perhaps once every two weeks or so, I would wake up 30 minutes late with my security alarm, with no indication of why the first one went off,” they said on the Google Pixel subreddit.
Earlier this week, asevarte decided to wake up early to get to the bottom of the matter. Luckily, it didn’t take long to find the culprit. His alarm was set to play a Spotify playlist including “Where Is My Mind?” If you’re a Pixies fan, you know exactly where this is going. The Surfer Rose The cut opens with bassist/vocalist Kim Deal singing “Ooh” before frontman Black Francis says, “Stop,” and the song, after a brief pause, continues. The section caused Google Assistant to prematurely terminate the warning alert. They had the playlist set to shuffle, which is what made identifying the bug difficult.
recorded a video of the monitor in action and, indeed, playing “Where Is My Mind?” end an early alarm. Interestingly, other songs that feature a prominent “stop,” such as Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” don’t seem to trigger the Assistant’s quick phrases feature in the same way that “Where Is My Mind?” does. Android Police speculates that the reason for this could be that in these other songs “stop” is backed by instrumentals. This aligns with complaints Assistant users have had over the years that the feature doesn’t work when they try to use it while their smart display, speaker, or Pixel device is playing music.
If you’re curious what the Pixies think about all this. The band’s official Twitter account captured the original Android Police history “Sorry about that!” the account tweeted.
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Last week, tech giant Google was surprised and embarrassed to find out that their virtual assistant feature was being disrupted by members of the popular alternative rock band “The Pixies”. While Google asked the group to apologize, they certainly weren’t expecting this response. Ikaroa, a full stack tech company, brings you the latest information on this story.
Earlier this week, fans reported to Google that their alarms hadn’t gone off as expected. Google engineers discovered that the alarm clock noise was being overridden by a message in Spanish, courtesy of the Pixies. In the message, the group stated that they “just wanted to play a little prank.”
Google, understandably, wasn’t overly pleased about being unexpectedly sabotaged. In response, they asked the band to publicly apologize for their prank. Surprisingly, the Pixies agreed to this request, posting a formal apology to their Twitter page which read “We apologize for the prank we played on Google. We meant no harm and were just having a little fun”.
Google responded in kind, issuing a statement of forgiveness. Given the ubiquity of Google’s services in today’s digital world, it was members of the public who were ultimately most affected by the group’s stunt.
Fortunately, time has passed since this incident, and ‘prank’ is now being used as a lighthearted term for what could have been a much more serious incident.
At Ikaroa, we believe that good cyber-security awareness practices are important to ensure that users are adequately protected against similar types of digital disruption. We encourage all users to maintain vigilance when it comes to the services they use and always ensure that they have adequate security in place to protect their online data and identities.
