Creepiness Alert! Alexa starts laughing without being prompted, Amazon works on a fix

Past few days, reports of Amazon Alexa users complaining about hearing a strange sound have been emerging online. As per their statements, they end up listening strange, unprompted laughter, which is seriously creeping them out. In response, Amazon has given out an official announcement. They stated that they are aware of the problem and are working on a fix for it.

To fix the problem, the e-commerce giant ended up disabling the phrase, “Alexa, laugh”altogether. Instead, the company replaced the phrase with, “Alexa, can you laugh?” According to Amazon, the former statement is more likely to have false positive in comparison to the latter. In other words, Amazon’s Alexa is less likely to mistake common words and phrases that make it start laughing. “We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to ‘Sure, I can laugh’ followed by the laughter,” an Amazon spokesperson said.

However, users still can’t get over the offensive manner in which Alexa began laughing As noted in several media reports and trends on social media platforms such as Twitter, Alexa started laughing without being prompted to wake. As per the statements posted by users, they thought that it was the actual person laughing near them. This is probably scary especially if you’re home alone. Many even responded to the crackling sound by unplugging their smart-home speakers. Twitter user @CaptHandlebar was one of the first to report experiencing this back on February 22.

Since then, numerous users have started hearing the laughter. Some of them were reported as stating that Alexa would often laugh and switch the light off after that. Many have related the laughter back to a moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when HAL 9000 acknowledges his murderous intentions and proclaims, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”