Voice assistants are notoriously difficult to activate, such as responding to spoken prompts within ads. Apple may be fixing that issue. 9to5Mac spotted this element in the tvOS 18.2 beta. A piece of code called AdBlocker appears to use the Shazam API to match audio captured by a device’s microphone to an audio fingerprint downloaded from Apple. If there is a match, normal Siri trigger commands are disabled. In theory, this means your device could prevent your device from responding to the “Hey Siri” prompt when Apple speaks it as part of the company’s keynotes or TV ads.
The publication notes that the feature has only been found in the current developer beta of tvOS, meaning the HomePod smart speaker will be the first device to potentially ignore these “Hey Siri” commands. suggests that it does. However, iOS 18.2 is also in developer beta and will bring more Apple Intelligence features to Apple’s smartphones, as well as potentially integrating ChatGPT subscriptions with Siri.
