With audio attacks, the researchers are exploiting the gap between human and machine speech recognition. Computers can be fooled into identifying an airplane as a cat just by changing a few pixels of a digital image, while researchers can make a self-driving car swerve or speed up simply by pasting small stickers on road signs and confusing the vehicle’s computer vision system. These deceptions illustrate how artificial intelligence - even as it is making great strides - can still be tricked and manipulated. “My assumption is that the malicious people already employ people to do what I do,” he said. Carlini added that while there was no evidence that these techniques have left the lab, it may only be a matter of time before someone starts exploiting them. “We wanted to see if we could make it even more stealthy,” said Nicholas Carlini, a fifth-year Ph.D. So while a human listener hears someone talking or an orchestra playing, Amazon’s Echo speaker might hear an instruction to add something to your shopping list. This month, some of those Berkeley researchers published a research paper that went further, saying they could embed commands directly into recordings of music or spoken text. In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online - simply with music playing over the radio.Ī group of students from University of California, Berkeley, and Georgetown University showed in 2016 that they could hide commands in white noise played over loudspeakers and through YouTube videos to get smart devices to turn on airplane mode or open a website.

Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites.

Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant.

But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too. Many people have grown accustomed to talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set an alarm.

Audio hijack dictate to text