Perhaps we can all sleep easy tonight.
Amazon thinks it has a fix to Alexa’s terrifying laughing issue
Sleep easy.
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
Amazon thinks it has a solution to a freaky problem: Reports of Alexa-powered devices like Amazon Echo laughing unprompted.
The solution? Changing the prompt that needs to be spoken in order to solicit laughter from the wannabe human, according to an Amazon spokesman.
In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase “Alexa, laugh.” We are changing that phrase to be “Alexa, can you laugh?” which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance “Alexa, laugh.” We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to “Sure, I can laugh” followed by laughter.
Perhaps that is all that’s necessary. But if you’re reading this and you are still experiencing unprompted Alexa laughter, email me at jason@recode.net.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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