Alexa, add this to my to-do list. Alexa, can you play music? Alexa, what's the weather like today? Alexa, can you... wait... ALEXA, ARE YOU LAUGHING AT ME?!
Alexa is Amazon's digital assistant built into devices such as the Amazon Echo. Alexa is Amazon's virtual assistant, like Siri from Apple's iPhone. In the past few days, some users have reported hearing strange laughing noises at random. It even started a trending Twitter moment! Since then, different people have noted hearing the laughter. It’s sometimes unprompted or appears as a bizarre response to requests to turn off the lights.
Amazon confirmed that the glitch occured due to Alexa mistakenly hearing the phrase "Alexa, laugh," which under its normal programming would trigger it to chuckle. The shopping giant responded quickly by deploying a software update to the speaker that fixed the issue.So Alexa decided to laugh randomly while I was in the kitchen. Freaked @SnootyJuicer and I out. I thought a kid was laughing behind me. pic.twitter.com/6dblzkiQHp— CaptHandlebar (@CaptHandlebar) February 23, 2018
Amazon disabled the short utterance "Alexa, laugh," and changed the command phrase to "Alexa, can you laugh?" The new phrase is less likely to have have false positives. According to Amazon's spokesperson, Amazon is also changing the assistant's reponse to the prompt from simply laughter to "Sure, I can laugh," followed by laughter.Lying in bed about to fall asleep when Alexa on my Amazon Echo Dot lets out a very loud and creepy laugh... there’s a good chance I get murdered tonight.— Gavin Hightower (@GavinHightower) February 26, 2018
Until the glitch is completely fixed, users can prevent the creepy laughter by leaving the unplugged.
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