The Demon Voice That Can Control Your Smartphone

Here's a fun experiment: Next time you're on a crowded bus, loudly announce, "Hey Siri! Chances are you'll get some horrified looks as your voice awakens iPhones in nearby commuters' pockets and bags. They'll dive for their phones to cancel your command. But what if there was a way to talk to phones with sounds other than words? Unless the phones' owners were prompted for confirmation--and realized what was going on in time to intervene--they'd have no idea that anything was being texted on their behalf. Turns out there's a gap between the kinds of sounds that people and computers understand as human speech. Last summer, a group of Ph.D. candidates at Georgetown and Berkeley exploited that gap: They developed a way to create voice commands that computers can parse--but that sound like meaningless noise to humans.