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Amazon Echo’s Are Laughing at Us

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8 March 2018

By Alex Khalil

Alexa

Amazon’s Alexa speakers and devices allow you to speak to the gadget that can make shopping lists, play music and answer simple questions. However, the always-on component also reminds folk that they are always watching. Sometimes literally laughing at us.

Well, this is terrifying.

A bug has been causing hundreds of people’s Echo’s to laugh randomly.

That’s horrifying.

Users were reporting seemingly random laughter from their smart speakers with no discernible cause. For the longest time, Amazon itself had no idea what was causing the bug. It certainly feels like the prelude to a Black Mirror episode.

As reported by CNET, Amazon later revealed the devices were mistakenly hearing the phrase ‘Alexa laugh’.

An Amazon spokesperson stated:

‘We are changing the 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.’

Weird.

In other Amazon news, Google went through with removing the YouTube app from the Amazon Firestick, after a company-wide dispute split the two monopolies. The tension began when Amazon started to remove Google’s home product from its service.

You can read more here and here. 

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