Hands on Tech 202 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
00:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Coming up on Hands-On Tech. Let's take a look at how we can stop our devices from listening to us. And no, this isn't the thing about devices listening to us to service ads. Don't worry, stay tuned. You'll hear more about it in a moment. This is Twit. Hello and welcome to Hands-On Tech.
00:25
I am Micah Sargent and today we are taking a look at another tech question. This one comes in from Glenn. Glenn writes how do I turn off Apple from listening to what's going on in a room, in this case my office? It's creepy. In my office I have a Mac Studio for photography work, plus a MacBook Pro with a lid closed with an Apple Studio display, plus two recently purchased HomePods. Quite often I'm working on one of the two systems with a YouTube video, macbreak Weekly. That's what they have in parentheses. Glenn has in parentheses running in the background and suddenly from my HomePods. I'll get. I found some web results I can show you if you request from your iPhone. Besides the annoyance factor, it's the fact that I'm being listened to without my knowledge. So what is the best way to prevent it from listening? Is there perhaps an app for that? I very rarely use Siri. It's just not that good. I mostly use Google Chrome or ChatGPT.
01:48
Glenn, first and foremost, I want to give you some assurance here. When the let me say this too, I don't want to, um, dismiss your the creepiness factor, if you're feeling like it's creepy for you, totally understand. I do want to explain the technology, um, to maybe give you some, uh, reassurance that it's not doing maybe what you might expect that it's doing. I like to you get the wooden table kind of a thing and it's got a square and a triangle and a circle in the top of it, right, and you have all of these different blocks and you are trying to shove all the blocks in and only the square, the triangle and the circle work. Imagine that you've got this kind of positioned in a I don't know, on a conveyor belt, right, and you have thousands and thousands of blocks that are coming along on the conveyor belt and rolling over the top of that toddler block puzzle and as those thousands and thousands of words go over, only when the square, the triangle, then the circle fall into place, does that toddler puzzle actually, in this case, siri actually activate. So it is not actively listening, in the sense that it's trying to pull in everything that you say, and in particular, it is not doing anything with everything that you say. It's not sending it off somewhere, it's not anything like that. Instead, there's like a little toddler block puzzle inside and it's just waiting for those to fall right into place and then it goes. Oh, you're talking to me Now.
03:27
Sometimes, annoyingly, it misunderstands, because maybe there's a, it's a circle, but it's small enough that it fits inside of the square. Or there's a square but it's small enough that it fits inside of the middle of the triangle, and then there's a I don't know a trapezoid, but again it's small enough that it fits inside of the circle. And so that is akin to when it thinks that you are saying the keyword phrase but you're not actually saying the keyword phrase. That is kind of what's happening there. So it's not that actively. There's a connection between you and Apple somewhere on some server and it is listening to everything that's happening in the you and Apple somewhere on some server and it is listening to everything that's happening in the room and pulling that information and putting it somewhere else. No, it doesn't want that information, it doesn't have that information. It is simply on device locally waiting for those blocks to fall into place, and then it activates again, though that doesn't mean that we you shouldn't feel, you know, bothered by it. If you are, if you feel bothered by it, even though it's not pulling that information and putting it somewhere else, even though it's just happening locally on device, totally understandable and it is a thing that you can turn off. I have a thing that you can turn off. I have it turned off on my Mac because I never use Siri on my Mac, and that's as simple as launching the system settings app on the Mac using Apple Intelligence and Siri, and under Siri requests, there's an option that says listen for and you simply choose off. And so my Mac never is accidentally activating for Siri.
05:20
Some of my other devices, yes, because they are listening, but let's take a look at how to, because it sounds like the HomePods are your main issue. How do we go about disabling that? Well, something that can be a little confusing for people is that this takes place in the Home app, versus elsewhere, where you've got like a settings app right that you can work with. We need to launch the Home app and we need to find the room in which the HomePod is located. So in this case, yours is in your office. So we'll tap on the office room and we will find the HomePod. We will tap and hold on it and choose accessory settings and then we need to scroll down to Siri and where we have the option for listen for Siri or hey, s-i-r-i, which I will not say because it will cause it to be listening to me I simply tap on that and I choose to turn off these different devices.
06:23
So I can say turn it off for the office HomePod, turn it off for the kitchen HomePod, turn it off for the living room HomePod. That means that none of those devices will be listening for that keyword phrase. Now, if you want them to occasionally still have access and you want to be able to talk to them on occasion, you can keep this option that says touch and hold for Siri. What that means is if you walk up to the HomePod and you tap on the top and hold down, you can talk to Siri that way. So that gives you the ability to still access it if you want to. But you are the one saying now, I actually want you to listen, and that can be helpful when it comes to having Siri actually respond to you as you want it to, versus having it do that when you don't want it to. So that is how you stop the kind of activations from taking place on your devices whenever you don't want them.
07:20
Now I wanted to mention too, there are other devices that you might have that have these activations, these keyword activations, like an ALEXA device, for example, an Amazon Echo and Amazon, on almost all of its own devices, makes this much simpler, because you will find a physical hardware button or switch that will disable the microphone entirely and make it so that that keyword phrase is not even possible to activate the device. So if you just wanna use it as a smart speaker that you control with your phone or whatever it happens to be, it's as simple as pressing a button or flipping a switch to be able to turn that off With your HomePods and with your Apple devices, you do have to head into the settings for those things. So again, it just depends on what device you have. But, yes, all of them are going to give you that ability to turn it off in some way.
08:27
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09:02
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