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Amazon's Alexa laughs out loud

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Johannesburg, 08 Mar 2018
Amazon says it's aware its smart home speaker is creeping people out with spontaneous laughter.
Amazon says it's aware its smart home speaker is creeping people out with spontaneous laughter.

Amazon's digital personal assistant, Alexa, which lives on its line of smart home speakers, has reportedly been laughing unprompted at users.

The Amazon Echo is an Internet-connected speaker that lets users control smart home devices with their voices. Users can also ask the speaker questions like: "Alexa, what is the weather like tomorrow?" or: "Alexa, who won the Australian Open on the weekend?"

The speaker is listening all the time for the prompt 'Alexa' and is not supposed to light up and speak spontaneously.

A number of users flocked to Twitter this week to say its Amazon Echo was randomly letting out a woman's human-sounding laugh.

Kyle Fitzy Shanklin tweeted on Sunday: "Why did my Alexa just laugh out of the blue?!?!?!?" And Beau Brown said on the platform yesterday: "Okay, uh... my Alexa just laughed at me out of nowhere. I wasn't even talking... like a creepy evil laugh for a second or two then cut off..."

There were theories going around saying it was an engineer at Amazon 'having a laugh'.

Some users said they thought Alexa must have misheard them. Vedant Naik tweeted: "I live alone and have lights controlled by Amazon Echo. Tonight, while sleeping, I closed my eyes and said 'Alexa, lamp off.' I heard a woman laugh, and lights were still on.

"Now, I know that stupid device heard 'laugh' instead of 'lamp off', but I can't sleep anymore....."

In a statement from Amazon, the company offered an explanation for the unprompted laughter: "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."

Previously, users would just hear human laughter from a woman when the prompt was mistakenly heard; now users will hear a mechanical laugh that goes 'tee-hee'.

Other than the laugh, users have also reported other weird occurrences with the speaker.

Evil von Brainstorm tweeted: "Mine doesn't laugh, but about a week ago, alone, watching TV at around midnight, she lights up and says, 'He's home. He's home.' Freaked me out."

Matthew tweeted: "Mine suddenly started talking a few days ago, but I couldn't make out what it was saying. This is getting creepier and creepier."

Supermom1242 tweeted: "Mine whistled upstairs in my bedroom. No one's home besides me and my dogs. And my upstairs dog, I call her that because one dog stays downstairs at night to sleep on the couch lol. The other comes to bed at night with us. Alexa is in the trash, I thought I was losing my mind."

iResist said on Twitter it had already thrown the speaker out. "Unplugged Alexa over a year ago when she lit up and began listening in a room that was completely silent. Didn't even give a scary laugh as a warning. She's gone."

The Amazon speaker line-up is not available to buy in South Africa, but some people in the country have brought them in. The speakers will work here, but have limited capabilities in regards to actions that require local knowledge.

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