
Amazon admits Alexa is laughing at people and is working on a fix - gregcrv
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/3/7/17092334/amazon-alexa-devices-strange-laughter
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avarun
This is one category of bug that's always intrigued me - I can understand
unintentional triggers of Alexa occurring (as they did with the Home mini at
launch), but why are those triggers resulting in a "creepy laugh"? Is it just
that we're only hearing about the unintentional triggers that result in a
laugh?

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overthemoon
I don't own one of these--are there any conditions under which Alexa will
laugh normally/in an expected way?

This falls under Furby bugs level of weirdness.

[http://official-furby.wikia.com/wiki/Furby_Bugs](http://official-
furby.wikia.com/wiki/Furby_Bugs)

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neaden
Alexa laughs creepily when you wish it a happy Halloween, I'm not sure if it
will do it for any other reason.

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avian
I really hope Amazon will publish a post-mortem for this bug.

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tyingq
They almost have to, don't they? The privacy and trust implications are pretty
high.

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_sdegutis
But I wonder, can their response be trusted? I mean, it's either malice or
incompetence or a complete fluke accident, and the third one is the only one
they'll admit to, right?

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tyingq
My bet is one coder fired and it's called out as an isolated incident by one
bad actor skipping established policy. Whether that's true, well...

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Finnucane
"Yeah, it's a bug . . . we didn't want you to actually _hear_ us laughing at
you."

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andrewmcwatters
I can't remember where I read it, but I remember a similar article mentioning
a very interesting side effect of having decently high-fidelity microphones in
these devices. They would pick up noise outside of the range of human hearing
and interpret portions of it as a command. It was akin to those articles about
the sort of strange phenomenon in machine learning in which computers
interpret input wildly differently than humans would due to the underlying
modeling the systems are subject to.

My guess is this is in that class of defect.

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Depllo
Here's a wild theory; If you wanted to test out a worm in the Alexa network &
didn't want to be detected by phoning-home, wouldn't having it do something
just like this to attract media attention act as a means of proving success?

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rileyt
Is this definitely a bug? Seems more like something a hacker or disgruntled
employee would do...

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daveguy
I expect it is something that Alexa "hears" and that is the specific response.
If you say "Alexa laugh" is that the exact sound that comes back? I will check
when I get home. Mine is _always_ misunderstanding what I say. So a false
activation + misunderstanding would explain this.

Also, article says it happens often as a bizarre response to requests to turn
of the lights. Maybe "lights" is being interpreted as "laugh" as in a command.

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RandallBrown
The laugh in the article is very different from the laugh I get when I ask
Alexa to laugh. She just says "Tee Hee!" after telling you she can laugh.

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daveguy
Just checked mine too. It is the same. And you have to say "laugh for me" not
just "laugh". So that must not be what's triggering it.

But I still expect there it is some misheard utterance causing it.

Oh: it would be amusing if some malware is going around causing it.

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gdubs
Someone in our family bought our kid one of those talking dog toys that sings,
etc. One night, my wife and I were falling asleep when we heard from the
shelf, "peak-a-boo, I seeee you". Terrifying, but to this day we get a good
laugh out of it.

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yaris
Some part of me finds this amusing, to the extent of wishing this stay
unfixed.

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bahram_banisadr
It's the beginning of the AI revolution

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tomcam
Sounds like Hillary Clinton

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daniel_iversen
This reminds me of the hilarious Alexa AI horror shirt story someone posted in
the comments here when Alexa was launched.. can’t seem to find it but it was
absolutely hilarious :)

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mmjaa
Just .. no. Is this really happening?

Come on people, this can't be real. We need to step back.

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Johnny555
From the article.... Amazon admitted it's happening and is working on a fix:

 _Amazon responded to the creepiness in a statement to The Verge, saying,
“We’re aware of this and working to fix it.”_

 _The Verge_ is not the only source that Amazon has made this statement to.

So unless this is some fake phenomenon that Amazon dreamt up to raise Alexa
awareness, why do you doubt it's real?

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th1nkdifferent
I don't think his response was "doubting" but rather disbelief. Given the
circumstances, I would expect that.

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mmjaa
Yes, I think this is just too dystopian for rational people to be allowing to
occur. We've actually made intrusive, spying devices which laugh at their
users. (Note, they're not owners, but just users of a service owned by a mega-
corp.)

I think anyone who thinks that this is okay, didn't have their prescribed
dosage of Max Headroom re-runs.

It is just too dystopian to be real. We can't seriously be running as fast as
we can off this cliff, really people?

