The activity history holds a clip of the audio that triggered each command, because that is how you report a mistake. Nineteen of mine are a voice in my kitchen that is not mine and is not the television.
I have two of these speakers, one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom, and I have had them since 2020.
The history is the part people do not look at.
In the app there is a page listing every command the speaker has acted on. Date, time, which device, what it understood, and a little play button.
The play button plays the audio. Not the whole room and not continuously: it keeps the few seconds around the wake word, because the company needs it to be able to say why the thing did what it did, and because you can press a button marked "this wasn't for you" and that clip is how they improve it.
You can also see, and this matters, which account the command was attributed to. There is one account and it is mine and it has one voice profile on it, which is mine.
Since 2022 there are nineteen commands I did not give.
All on the kitchen device. All between 01:40 and 03:20.
Eleven of them are the same command, which is asking what the time is.
Four are asking to turn the kitchen light on, which it does, because the kitchen light is on a smart plug.
Three are asking about the weather.
One, in the November of 2023, is a single word that the transcript renders as a name. Not my name.
The audio.
I have listened to all nineteen more times than is good for anybody.
It is a voice. Male, older, quite low, with an accent that is roughly local but a generation off, the way people who grew up here in the fifties sound compared to how people sound now.
It is not loud. It sounds like somebody speaking normally about the distance of the width of a kitchen.
There is nothing else on the clips. No television, no radio, no traffic, no other person. Just the room and the voice and, on two of them, the fridge cycling, which my fridge does with a particular click I would know anywhere.
Everything sensible, and I have done all of it twice.
The television. This is the first and best answer, because a speaker mishearing a television is the commonest false wake there is. My television is in the front room, two rooms and a hall away, and it is off at two in the morning, and the standby draw on my energy monitor confirms that. There is no radio in the kitchen.
A phone. A voice on a video on a phone left playing could do it, and I have looked at my own screen time for those nights, and my phone is on charge upstairs and does nothing between midnight and six.
A neighbour. It is a mid terrace and the kitchen backs onto next door's kitchen. This one I took seriously for a year, because a voice through a wall is not impossible.
Their kitchen is on the other side of the house. The wall my kitchen shares is their staircase, and I know this because they had me in to look at a damp patch in 2023 and I stood in their hall and worked out the geometry while a woman talked to me about her guttering.
And a voice through a wall does not wake a speaker. It is too quiet and too muffled. I have tested that with my neighbour's agreement, both of us shouting the wake word at each other through a wall, feeling ridiculous, for twenty minutes. Nothing.
The attribution.
Every one of the nineteen is attributed to my account, because it is my speaker.
But the app has a voice recognition feature that says which household member spoke, when you have more than one enrolled. I have one enrolled, which is me.
On seventeen of the nineteen the entry says the speaker was not recognised, which is what it says for a guest.
On two of them it says it was me.
I have listened to those two next to each other with the other seventeen and they are the same voice as the other seventeen, and it is not mine, and I have recorded myself saying the same words and played all three back to my sister without telling her what she was listening to.
She said the two were the same man as the seventeen and that neither of them was me, and then she asked what this was about, and I said it was a thing at work.
What I have not done is unplug it.
I have thought about why for three years and I have got as far as this.
The eleven that ask the time are what an old man in a kitchen at two in the morning would ask, if he did not know what time it was and could not see a clock.
The four that turn the light on are what he would ask if it were dark.
And the three about the weather are what my grandfather asked the radio every single morning of the eleven years I knew him, standing in a kitchen, before he decided whether to go out.
That last sentence is not evidence and I know it is not evidence. My grandfather died in 1998 in a different county in a house I have been to twice, and the voice does not sound like him and I would not claim it does.
What I do now.
The kitchen light is on a plug and I have left it on the plug rather than moving it, which is a decision I made in 2023 and have not revisited.
I have turned off the notification that tells me when the speaker has acted on something, because getting one at ten to three woke me up and I lay there for the rest of the night.
I check the history on a Sunday, with coffee, in daylight, which is the only sensible way to do it.
And in the March there were two on the same night, four minutes apart, and the first one asks the time, and the second one is not a command at all. The transcript is empty and the speaker did nothing with it, and it is in the history only because the wake word was said.
The clip is eleven seconds long. The first two seconds are the wake word and the other nine are the voice, quite close to the speaker, saying something I have listened to about four hundred times and cannot make into words.
It is not a request. It has the shape of somebody answering.