Numerous owners of the Amazon Echo smart speaker with a digital assistant named Alexa report strange behavior of the gadget. Suddenly, without any warning, Alex starts to laugh. Sometimes this happens in the middle of the night, which causes the owners to wake up in fright.
In addition, the column began involuntarily without a command to perform some other actions. For example, read aloud the names of local funeral company cemeteries.
Amazon told The Verge that it is aware of a bug in the speech recognition system and is working on a patch.
The glitches of the artificial intelligence system began at the same time for many users. One of the members of the forum on Reddit complains that the column refused to turn off the lights in the apartment on command. That is, she turned off the light, but then turned it back on. The third time she refused to turn off the light altogether and "laughed viciously." At the same time, laughter sounded as if not in the voice of the speaker, but in a strange voice. The unhappy person still shivers when he remembers this.
In another similar case, Alexa scared his wife and 5-year-old child so much that the artificial intelligence was completely disconnected from the power supply. Subsequently, the owners repeatedly asked Alex to laugh - but never once did this sound sound like the eerie laugh they heard then.
Another user named Gavin Hightower says that he was about to go to bed when Alexa suddenly started laughing very loudly and eerily. The laughter was as if a person had not long to live - and if he fell asleep, he would not wake up again.
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In most cases, Alexa would start laughing for no reason and without warning, but one user says that the column said a few words, namely, "Of course I can laugh, ti hee."
Alexa in the afternoon
User David Woodland said that he was in business negotiations and discussed rather confidential things - and in the middle of the conversation, Alex suddenly laughed. You can imagine how people perceived this - the impression is that they were overheard, and now they are being made fun of. But we must admit that the user is to blame for not turning off the column during confidential negotiations. Indeed, in this case, she carries out constant wiretapping (in order to be able to react to the command), and even sends the results of wiretapping to the cloud service for recognition. That is, in any case, it is unsafe.
According to the program settings, Alexa is instructed to laugh if her owner tells a joke or anecdote and asks her “digital girlfriend” to laugh at her wit with a special command “Alexa, laugh”. But in all the latter cases, the person did not say anything funny, and often did not make any sounds at all, except for breathing and rustles.
Some users say that laughter is heard not just at random times, but at the most inappropriate moments - as if Alexa deliberately chooses when you can scare a person the most. However, this is probably the suspiciousness and impressionability of people who do not understand well the structure of the system. It is obvious that a weak AI system is not capable of such a deep analysis.
An Amazon spokesman acknowledged a problem with the speech recognition system and made an official comment: “In rare cases, Alexa may mistakenly hear the phrase 'Alexa, laugh'. We are now changing it to the phrase "Alexa, can you laugh?", Which has less chance of false positives. " In addition to canceling the short version of the command "Alexa, laugh", the company is going to change the programmed response of Alexa from a simple single laugh to the phrase "Sure, I can laugh" (Sure, I can laugh) followed by a laugh.
