It’s late a night. It’s dark and the house is quiet. You’re alone. Suddenly, you hear a laugh coming from another room. After you change your pants, you start investigating, hoping that the hours you’ve dedicated to watching Die Hard every Christmas and wishing you could pull Black Widow’s moves will be be enough. Then you hear the laugh again only to discover it’s Amazon Alexa, randomly laughing without a prompt.
The good news is that Amazon is aware and working on fixing the bug. I haven’t heard it on my Amazon Echo but there are plenty of reports about it.
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 has issued’s a statement saying “We’re aware of this and working to fix it.”
You can reproduce the laugh by asking Alexa to laugh.
All of this goes to show that while it’s cool to have a house that can respond to you when you need something it’s kinda freaky when it goes even a little bit wrong.
I end most days by asking Alexa what tomorrow’s weather will be and will get her to read the news headlines while I’m taking my lunch break. And while Alexa’s laugh (probably) isn’t likely to be a sign that the AI rising up to overthrow the pesky skin-bags roaming the planet, it did remind me of this terrible movie from the 1980s.