South Park Studios
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2021–2024
1:44 · 3.2M views · Dec 18, 2021
A short South Park clip from the 'Post COVID: The Return of COVID' special in which Stan relies on his Alexa. It plays on voice assistants responding to their wake word.
HN mostly uses it as a joke or a demonstration of Alexa waking up on cue.
3 comments from Hacker News
If you watch this video you will get Alexa waking up. Meanwhile [LINK] and [LINK] and don't. Play them on a TV or tiny computer speaker. You can hear 3 kHz quite well. [LINK] And we can hear up to 20 kHz when young (that's 3 octaves higher than 3 kHz). [LINK] And while this is audio people talking about sound... [LINK] > 3k is commonly the most sensitive frequency for human ears - we use it for testing wow and flutter on tape machines; you can hear pitch variation there easiest. 3k is a ballpark, but a good one - I think it works anywhere in that region 2-4k, but usually 3k is THE ONE. > When I have a harsh fuzz guitar or trashy cymbal, I often try to just tuck down the 3k region, and suddenly it no longer covers everything. It still sounds thick and harsh, but nothing kills your ears. > ... > Cutting at 3k can help hide out of tune instruments and bad pitch on vocals as well. --- Late edit. Extracting the audio of the "Alexa looses her voice" and sending it into [LINK] - watch at the range around 5.1 kHz (about the center of the 3 kHz to 6 kHz octave). It starts out with: [LINK] That spike is the actress saying "Alexa" and you can see the unnatural gap in that range. Also, there is sound in that mp3 all the way out to 14 kHz.
The South Park: Post Covid special had Amazon Alexa androids who were girlfriends to some characters. The boyfriend had to walk on eggshells with some topics or Alexa would go into a screaming fit. Kind of prescient. this video
Will Alexa evolve into something crazy like what was depicted in South Park Post COVID ? I think it will. this video