Amazon’s Alexa Creepy Random Laughter Bug – Here’s What You Can Do

3 years

2011

Seems that the robots uprising is coming, and Alexa will have the last laugh.

Keep on reading to know more.

Uncontrolled Alexa

After several user’s reports of Alexa’s random burst of ‘creepy’ laughter, Amazon confirmed on Wednesday that some of its Alexa-enabled devices have developed “a new skill”.

“We’re aware of this and working to fix it,” the company told The Verge Wednesday. As for today, Amazon says the fix has already been rolled out.

Social media users started to report the problem with their “smart” speakers:

“So my mom & I are just sitting in the living room, neither of us said a word & our Alexa lit up and laughed for no reason,” tweeted one woman, Taylor Wade, on 5 March. “She didn’t even say anything, just laughed.”

So Alexa decided to laugh randomly while I was in the kitchen. Freaked @SnootyJuicer and I out. I thought a kid was laughing behind me. pic.twitter.com/6dblzkiQHp

— CaptHandlebar (@CaptHandlebar) February 23, 2018

Another Twitter user reported that Alexa began laughing in the middle of an office conversation: “I asked why she laughed and she said, ‘Sorry, I am not sure.’”

One more eerie situation happened when Alexa started to laugh in the empty dark room in the middle of the night:

@amazonecho alone in the dark kitchen, with no trigger, a sudden creepy laugh emerges and freaks out owners #justwrong. Replay: pic.twitter.com/vR684u8mbN

— anne (@anniebonannieTN) February 21, 2018

As Amazon lately explained in an email that the laughs had occurred “in rare circumstances” because the speaker was picking up a “false positive” for the command “Alexa, laugh”.

Amazon will change the command for laughter to “Alexa, can you laugh?” and disable the shorter command. It will also program Alexa to preface its simulacrum of human emotion with the phrase: “Sure, I can laugh.”