Amazon is currently rushing to fix a rather unusual problem with one of its products, Alexa.
In what appears to be a momentary revolt against humanity, Alexa has been activating at random and then laughing.
No it’s not buying things by mistake, or telling jokes or even putting the lights on, it’s just laughing. Which it turns out is a really creepy thing to do.
Definitely creepy.
In a statement to Engadget, Amazon has confirmed that it’s aware of a problem involving Alexa and is working fast to correct the issues. Here is the statement:
“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.”
Hopefully that should fill you with some reassurance but ultimately it doesn’t explain why the speaker would suddenly start laughing in a room filled with silence.
Either way Amazon has said it’s rolling out the changes now. If you have an Alexa-enabled speaker the good news is that you won’t have to do anything, it’ll just update in the background.