Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant can hear silent commands that you can't

A series of studies have proven that it's possible to secretly give silent commands to voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant without their owners ever knowing. According to the New York Times, researchers in both China and the U.S. have carried out a series of experiments which ultimately proved that it's possible to communicate silent commands that are undetectable to the human ear to voice assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. The findings call to light a variety of security concerns as they reveal just how vulnerable voice assistant data could be. In one study conducted by Georgetown University and University of California, Berkeley in 2016, student researchers successfully hid secret voice commands with the help of white noise. The students were able to get smart devices to switch over to airplane mode and navigate to websites by hiding commands to do so in white noise that way played through YouTube videos and loudspeakers.