Amazon’s Alexa Is Randomly Laughing At Users And It’s Creepy

We all have watched Black Mirror or at least know about its existence, due to its overgrowing popularity among the masses. Well, for those who don’t know about it, Black Mirror is an anthology series on Netflix that revolves around a group of people’s personal lives and how technology manipulates their behaviour. In short, it is about what life could be in future if technology continues to grow in the way it’s today.

Now, a strange thing happening to Amazon’s echo device Alexa seems to be straight out of the show.
Several people who own Amazon’s Alexa have reported a strange bug: The Alexa voice assistant has been laughing for apparently no reason. While at first, it seemed as if this certain action might lead to the issue, Amazon said in a statement has now confirmed that the outbursts are due to its smart speakers hearing accidental orders. “In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase ‘Alexa, laugh,’ ” Amazon said. To fix the issue, Amazon is disabling that command and changing the trigger phrase to “Alexa, can you laugh?”

Amazon is also bringing a change in the response of Alexa to the command. Instead of instantly laughing, the cackling will be preceded by the sentence, “Sure, I can laugh.”

While the team at Amazon is working on solving the problem, various users on Twitter are coming out with their bizarre and funny stories when Alexa’s random laugh entered their lives. Here are some of the tweets regarding the Alexa issue:

This is not the first glitch Alexa has had. Recently, various users reported that Alexa was down for several hours for no apparent reasons and then started working normally again after the halt.

Even though this is just a bug which will soon be fixed by the makers, we can’t help but think about all the technology we are constantly surrounded with, and how dangerous it can be for someone at sometime. Just think about it, you ’re sleeping in your room at night and suddenly the echo system in your house starts cackling up without any command, it sure will freak the heck out of anyone.

Jyotsna Amla