Voice assistants have a reputation for being complicated to activate, such as responding to directions spoken in an advertisement. Apple may have a fix for this in the works. 9to5Mac I spotted this item in the tvOS 18.2 beta. A piece of code called AdBlocker appears to use the Shazam API to compare audio captured by a device's microphones with audio fingerprints downloaded from Apple. When there is a match, the usual Siri activation command is disabled. In theory, this means Apple could make devices not react to the “Hey Siri” message when it is spoken as part of the company's keynote presentations or television ads.
The publication only found this feature in the current developer beta of tvOS, suggesting it means the HomePod smart speaker will be the first device to potentially ignore those “Hey Siri” commands. However, iOS 18.2 is also in developer beta and brings more Apple Intelligence features to Apple smartphones, as well as possibly integrating ChatGPT subscriptions with Siri.
