Humoring Alexa
Several people who own Amazon’s Echo speakers have reported a strange bug: The Alexa voice assistant has been laughing for no reason.
Some users on Twitter and Reddit say the outbursts have been entirely spontaneous. Others have said that Alexa has laughed after being asked to turn on the lights — and may have misheard the command.
“Having an office conversation about pretty confidential stuff and Alexa just laughed,” Twitter user DavidSvenwrote recently. “Anybody else ever have that? It didn’t chime as if we had accidentally triggered her to wake. She simply just laughed. It was really creepy.”
Said another Twitter user, taylorkatelynne: “My mom & I are just sitting in the living room, neither of us said a word & our Alexa lit up and laughed for no reason. she didn’t even say anything, just laughed. we unplugged her.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but it said in a statement to BuzzFeed, which first reported on the issue, that it is aware of the problem and is working to fix it. Amazon has not yet said what’s triggering the laughter or how many people have been affected.
This is not the first issue Alexa has had. Several Echo users reported last week that the voice assistant was down for several hours, drawing comparisons to Amazon’s Super Bowl commercial, in which the assistant lost its voice.