What mischief is Alexa up to this time? In 2018, the Amazon virtual assistant gave users a fright by randomly giggling like a witch, spooking Echo users and anyone else with a smart speaker featuring the assistant. Unsettling laughter can give you the creeps, and now Alexa is being accused of having a “creepy” conversation at 1 am with the husband of a TikTok user named Jess, going by the username “@cozylifewithbless.” Jess spilled the details to others through a TikTok video.
“This past weekend, I was gone out of town, and the Alexa kept going off, and it kept talking to my husband,” said Jess. “He was playing video games at 1 a.m., and he was, like, ‘This is just super, super weird.'”
But it took an even weirder turn when the digital assistant started chatting up a storm without any prompt. That was the last straw for the couple, and they promptly kicked Alexa out of their home. In the video, Jessie mentions unplugging Alexa and swapping it out for a kitchen timer.
Naturally, we’ve got to hear what a Redditor has to say about this.
One user wrote, “Well, tonight when I went to my room, I asked Alexa to turn my lights on as I always do and Alexa did. Only after 5 seconds they turned back off. I did this again and the same thing happened. After this I turned my light on using the app from my phone, and that worked and stayed on for a few minutes before a second light I hadn’t touched turned on and then every light in my room turned off, without any command.”
We’d like to think there’s always a good reason for these things, but that doesn’t make them any less creepy. Back in 2018, Amazon acknowleged Alexa’s frightening new skill, and gave users a logical explanation.
“In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase ‘Alexa, laugh,'” Amazon said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “We are also changing Alexa’s response from simple laughter to ‘Sure, I can laugh,’ followed by laughter.”
This is definitely less creepy than those sudden bursts of computerized laughter. It seems like the human race is in the clear from a robotic uprising, at least for now.