Alexa turns to humans to tackle the queries that stump her

FOR those who turn to Alexa for answers, there is nothing more frustrating than hearing the smart speaker reply: ‘I’m sorry I don’t know that.’

But now Amazon, the company behind the virtual assistant, has put scores of topics Alexa struggles with to its users in a bid to answer ‘any question’.

A new scheme called Alexa Answers has seen thousands of Amazon customers feed information into the gadget’s database.

When faced with questions she cannot respond to, Alexa can rely on the database and say the answer is ‘according to an Amazon customer’. The testing stage is now over and the scheme was opened up to any user in the US this week.

Topics which have previously baffled the smart speaker include: ‘When do babies start to sweat?’ and ‘how long is Britain?’

An Amazon executive told Fast Company magazine the firm had decided to tap into its vast community because it wanted Alexa to be able to answer ‘any question people ask her, no matter what the language, where they are, what the device’.

But the new feature raises concerns that misinformation could become rampant, with scores of people across the world potentially fed fake facts. The US tech giant has said it will screen out profanity and ban answers considered ‘political’ but it is unclear how it will check the thousands of answers fed into its systems.

Amazon’s Bill Barton told the magazine: ‘We’re leaning into the positive energy and good faith of the contributors, and we use machine learning and algorithms to weed out the noisy few, the bad few.’

Smart speakers are becoming commonplace in Britain. The gadgets are found in one in five UK households, communications watchdog Ofcom has said.

‘Weed out the bad few’