Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Alexa's 'really creepy' laugh that 'freaked out' users fixed, says Amazon

Via news.sky.com

Amazon has taken action after users of its digital assistant Alexa reported it randomly laughing, leading some to feel "freaked out".

Owners of Amazon Echo devices with the voice-enabled assistant had reported hearing them laugh at unexpected moments, with some calling the sound "really creepy".

@CaptHandlebar posted on Twitter: "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."

In a statement, Amazon said: "In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase 'Alexa, laugh.'

"We are changing that phrase to be 'Alexa, can you laugh?' which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance 'Alexa, laugh.'

"We are also changing Alexa's response from simply laughter to 'Sure, I can laugh' followed by laughter," it added.

The company says the fix has already been rolled out.


@kylefitzy8 summed up many users' response, posting: "WHY DID MY ALEXA JUST LAUGH OUT OF THE BLUE?!?!?!?

Like Apple's Siri, Alexa is a responsive digital assistant built into several Amazon devices. It is activated by saying the word "Alexa" or "Amazon", then a command like "play music".

But some users reported that the laughter occurred without Alexa being prompted to wake.

@DavidSven said: "Having an office conversation about pretty confidential stuff and Alexa just laughed. Anybody else ever have that? It didn't chime as if we had accidentally triggered her to wake. She simply just laughed. It was really creepy."

Others have claimed it happened when it was asked to perform different tasks, such as playing music.

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