Amazon Alexa's creepy, spontaneous laugh is weirding people out
Some people are creeped out enough having an Amazon Echo constantly listening to their every move in their home. But it gets even more disturbing than that.
As first reported by BuzzFeed, some Amazon Alexa users are reporting that their virtual assistant has been randomly laughing. Yes, randomly laughing.
Twitter user anniebonannieTN says they were alone in their kitchen in the dark when Alexa let out this disturbing chuckle. Thankfully, they were able to record the laugh by commanding Alexa to "replay."
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A quick search on Twitter brought up similar instances, each equally frightening.
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The Amazon Echo subreddit also had stories. One Reddit claims their Echo Dot randomly laughed twice at around 10 p.m.
To make things weirder, the Redditor added that there was "no indication on the app that the device heard any command."
The hope here is that something is accidentally registering a command to laugh from some other noise. Because Alexa is always listening and waits for a trigger word followed by a command, this is somewhat plausible.
However, if Alexa does mess up, a feature in the app allows you to see what the Echo heard in order to help improve its functions. This seems to not be the case from Redditor ema_chad.
Some Redditors suggested that a skill may have been added to the app. Amazon describes skills as "voice-driven capabilities that enhance and personalize your Alexa devices."
A quick search shows a number of laugh skills available for Alexa, so it is possible one was accidentally added, then triggered.
Either that or it's Jeff Bezos laughing every time he makes another billion dollars.
Topics Alexa Amazon Amazon Echo
