Erring new discovery by researchers reveal why these Digital assistants can be so scary

As if we needed more reasons to be freaked out by increasingly powerful digital assistants, there's a new nightmare scenario: The music you listen to or conversations you hear on TV could hijack your digital assistant with commands undetectable to human ears. 

This is known as a "Dolphin Attack" (because dolphins can hear what humans can't), and researchers have been aware of the possibility for years. The basic idea is that commands could be hidden in high-frequency sounds that our assistant-enabled gadgets can detect, but we are unable to hear.

The researchers were able to do this using recordings of music and speech; in both cases, the changes were almost completely undetectable. Notably, the researchers tested this with speech recognition software, not digital assistants, but the implications of the experiment are huge. 

A 4-second clip of music came out as “okay google browse to evil dot com” 

In one example, they took a 4-second clip of music, which, when fed to the speech recognition software, came out as “okay google browse to evil dot com.” They were able to do the same with speech — hiding "okay google browse to evil dot com," inside a recording of the phrase "without the data set the article is useless.” 

It's not difficult to imagine hackers using the technique to gain access to our assistants.