At some point, GoPro has snuck in some hidden voice commands for the Hero 5. I don’t know when or why they added these secret and strange voice commands but I do have a theory and I’ll explain in a minute but first let’s get to the secret and undocumented commands for the GoPro Hero 5.

Speak the following commands to your Hero 5 while capturing video and see what happens!

“That Was Sick”
“Oh S**T”

You will notice that those two secret voice commands will add new highlight tags to your captured GoPro footage. If your unfamiliar with GoPro highlight tags, basically it is a way of marking specific spots in video footage so later while editing via the GoPro Quick app you can easily find interesting parts or highlights of a video where you made a tag either by hitting the mode button while recording or by speaking “GoPro HiLight”. Now, these two secret hidden voice commands will add a tag as well if you have the voice commands feature enabled. This can save a lot of time going through hours of footage just to find the good parts.

Now the big question is WHY? Why would GoPro sneak in these strange secret and hidden commands and will there be more?

I have a theory of what is going on here, I think we are seeing a glimpse into the future of GoPro … and the future is awesome! Now if you watched any of Nick Woodman’s (founder and CEO of GoPro) interviews from CES 2017 he spoke about the future of GoPro and his vision of a seamless user experience were the GoPro camera is an extension of the smartphone and the users media or parts of it are uploaded to phone and edited/shared automatically.

So lets back up a bit. One of GoPro’s main mobile editing apps for tablets and smartphones is called Quik. Simply put the Quik desktop and smartphone app is an incredibly powerful yet simple video editor that can take several clips that you have recorded and make quick edits by analyzing the data and putting it all together with effects, transitions, and music. You can let Quik do all the work or you can go in a fine tune it yourself. This is where tagging highlights can play an important part. Quick can read these highlights so it knows when interesting this are happening in the footage and it will make sure those parts make the edit.

So Mr. Nick Woodman talked about what could possibly be available to GoPro users later on this year. His vision of a system that would record video, and when you are done automatically upload the content to your smartphone and have a beautiful edit waiting for you.

In order for this to work on the level that Mr. Woodman has envisioned. There will need to be some very smart algorithms and calculations going on in the background not only to make it work but to make it work on a level that the consumers would be happy with. Who wants an automatically edited video that is random and doesn’t show the good parts..

It all needs to start with the hardware and that is what we could be seeing with these hidden voice commands. When recording and something interesting happens we usually react audibly in some manner. Whether it be a scream, shouting, laughing or even vulgar words. The GoPro Camera could listen for audio clues and make HiLight tags based on a combination of audio, visual and even telemetry data. You combine these new audio/telemetry tags along with some smart algorithms for analyzing video footage you will end up with an amazing edited video all done without any input from the user. Now that would be truly fantastic.

Just imagine, your skiing down a hill and you have your GoPro capturing every moment. You get to the bottom and before you can even take your skis off you have an epic edit of your run already edited and uploaded to social media.

Nick Woodman stated that this could be a reality this year (2017) It would make sense to possibly launch alongside the GoPro Hero 6 this fall. 2017 could shape up to be an exciting year for GoPro enthusiasts. Let’s keep an eye out on firmware updates to see if they sneak other secret voice commands in.