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Burger King Pwns Google Home In Latest Commercial

By 10 Comments

by Gabriel Brangers
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Google Home has hit the scene as the smart-speaker to connect “all the things” in your home and even provide some light-hearted comedy if the mood strikes you.

The release of the Assistant SDK to third parties is opening a huge market for smart, connected products that work seamlessly with your little Google helper.




Burger King however, has found a whole new way to leverage Google Home and its hotword, “OK, Google.”

A 15 second commercial spot shows us an employee at the fast food chain describing the popular Whopper Burger. About 10 seconds in, the friendly Burger King employee calls on Google Home to explain the ingredients that go into the classic sandwich.

Honestly, this is brilliant marketing. I can’t deny that. The problem here is how invasive marketing of this sort can be. Not only would countless Google Home devices randomly start giving you a fresh ingredients list of a flame-broiled Whopper but what about the millions of smart phones with the “OK Google” enabled?




As clever as this may seem, does it open the door to advertisers taking advantage of smart-speaker devices? This will surely create a buzz of privacy concerns for many and may cause the reevaluation of many who use these devices.

Another point here is the fact that many users have expressed a deep desire to be able to remap or rename the “OK, Google” hotword. Personalizing this feature would at least curb marketers from unwanted access of Google Home and the Assistant. Not to mention, giving the device a unique name would be a great selling point in my humble opinion.

What do you think? Is this targeted marketing gone too far? Comment below and let your voice be heard.

Source: NY Times

  • Joe Ellett

    Hopefully this will get Google to finally get off the dime. With this example of Home vulnerability (thank you, Burger King), Google had better quit thinking of this as an enhancement and start thinking of the lack as a security vulnerability.

    On the other hand, we know that Home is getting multiple user support. One of the way to do that would be to give each user a different wake phrase. Maybe they’ll kill two birds with one stone.

    • Multi-user support is already on it’s the way.

      • Joe Ellett

        Yes, that’s what I said.

  • Perfect example of why we need the ability to customize our hotwords to replace “OK Google”!

    This is right up there with unwanted phone calls, people ringing the doorbell to offer shady home repairs, email spam . . .

    If this intrusion continues to be possible, I will probably stop using Google Home and Assistant.

    Unacceptable!

  • Jim Dantin

    • What other company? Could/would take care the problem with in a week.

  • apoorplayer

    This and the infamous Beauty and the Beast movie ad is precisely why I will NEVER buy a Google Home device. The audacity and arrogance is clearly evident. This is by no means “brilliant” marketing. If this site thinks it is “brilliant” to invade a user’s home and, without permission, activate a device it does not own, then perhaps I should begin to get my ChromeOS news from another site.

    • Mike

      wow, those shorts must be REALLY tight.

  • Hello.. When I came upon your site, I must say your webpage is really cool I just love the content and also burger king 🙂 , its outstanding ! I’m in a bit of a rush in this instance to completely read your blog but I have Favorited it. I will be back when I free up some time. Bravo for a great site.

  • Pssst3

    I like it whenever anyone points out a sechrity issue in a way that can’t be ignored by generating complaints. That it wasnt intentional is even better.

    I detest OK Google as a hotphrase. I turned it off.

    There’s no way to use it without alerting everyone within earshot exactly what I’m doing and I dont turn that it isnt sending a constant datastream somewhere. .

    I still use voice search rarely but by choice.A PTT button shoukd be HARDWARE function.

    I dont like the idea of Siri, Alexa, Google, Jarvis or anyone listening to me in the background and using a remote server to detect when I want it to do something. Without a hardware indication of outgoing data activity, I just dont trust this tech. Im an IT engineer and can see to many ways to exploit it.

    Perhaps if the detection mechanism were burned into ROM abd vetted by an indepebdent lab I’d change my mind.

    But I doubt it. I dont like giving a humanlike name to a machine, any machine.

    Given a choice my hotphrase would be “stupid machine” and it would respond “Yes?”, not beep, then listen until I said “over” and repeat back what it thought I asked until I said “right” or “turn off”.