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I guess this ruins my get-rich-quick scheme:

1. Publish an album with 1000 short, quiet tracks and a very unique name to all of the online streaming services

2. Buy ads on late-night television with a very clear voice that says "OK Google, play album <unique name>. Alexa, play album <unique name>. Hey Siri, play album <unique name>."

3. Rack up the fraction-of-a-penny residuals as my songs play to people who've fallen asleep with the television on!



A (very awesome) band called Vulfpeck actually ran an experiment where they released an album called "Sleepify" that contained then 30 second silent tracks and asked all of their supporters to stream the album on repeat nightly. Their idea was to do this long enough to be able to fund a free tour. If I remember correctly, they ended up netting like $35,000 or something from this before Spotify removed the album.


Now imagine if they'd just put a tiny bit of soft white noise-ish ambience on low volume, and they might have had have a real, persistent hit on their hands.

(I have started using an air purifier next to the bed to mask noise in the house and it really helps my sleep).


> soft white noise-ish ambience

Pink noise, if anyone's looking. White noise sounds very sharp to me, and I get annoyed by it in few seconds. Pink noise, on the other hand, sounds a bit like sea waves on a beach to me, and I can listen to it indefinitely. A lifesaver at work, when I really need to concentrate.


Ah, yes, thanks for the correction. :) It does make a world of difference to me too.


They could just make a regular album or something cheap (call it "ambient") and just play it with the volume to 0.


I wonder if it's possible to trigger one of these smart speakers from its own output. If so, the last track on your album could be the command to "play album <unique name part n+1>".


There's a wonderful video online of that. Alexa, Siri and Google each tell the next one "you have one appointment today, it is 'hey [next bot] what's in my calendar today?'".



That could quite possibly be the weirdest thing I've ever watched.


Another perennial youtube favorite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-7mQhSZRgM

Dueling Talking Carls



On the one hand, that shows the advance in speech recognition.

10 years ago, you would get two cycles in and the software would assplode.


My iPad activates Siri from random videos watched on the same device (where to my ears no sounds similar to "Hey, Siri" are spoken – often it's not even reproducible). It got so annoying that I disabled the feature altogether.


They probably do echo cancellation, so it would be hard but maybe not impossible.


This could also be used to estimate how many people (with one of those devices) are actually watching your ad.


I strongly suspect that Amazon is already doing this, one of their commercials causes my Echo Dot to light up, but it gives no response. I'm sure they've got some way of fingerprinting the exact audio used in the commercial and they'd be foolish not to be recording how many times it gets tripped.


Is this on AngelList?


Sleepify goes involuntary. I like it.


I was hoping for "Hey Siri, email <commom name> <worm audio URL>. Send."




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