Amazon admits Alexa is laughing at people and is working on a fix
theverge.com
theverge.com
This falls under Furby bugs level of weirdness.
So likely it's a false trigger on that phrase. It would be amusing if it's some kind of malware however.
My guess is that a developer replaced the "I didn't hear what you said." response with this creepy laugh on his home Alexa, then somehow accidentally pushed that build to the public.
The other explanations are a hack or disgruntled employee which seem worse.
Could be silly. Could be a veiled threat.
Other unprompted activations have been reported in abundance when Amazon installed chatbot functionality after the Alexa Prize: Alexa would start having conversations with herself in the middle of the night. One can expect bugs for newly added features, and of course the creepy ones are more likely to make the news than any random glitch.
From their perspective they don't and never will.
My guess is this is in that class of defect.
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.
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.
Come on people, this can't be real. We need to step back.
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?
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?
And we got here by way of technological apathy towards the ethics issues. And .. We are still here. Everyone thinks its okay, because "entrepreneurial triumph", and so on..
We need to step back from this abyss and take a good hard look at what we're making.
Yet we all carry a far more capable mobile spying device (with audio recording, video+photo capture, and even GPS tracking all built-in) in our pockets and keep it within arms reach at all times.
At least with an Echo you can look at the traffic volume it sends through your Wifi connection to get some sense of when it's sending audio back home but you can't easily audit the traffic your phone sends, you only know what the phone and your carrier report to you.
At least with the Echo, I can be pretty sure that it's only running Amazon software, while that free game I just downloaded might be taking a photo of me right now.
Because you have reasoned that it is acceptable to not have control over who/what observes your life, in the pursuit of .. convenience and leisure ..
Yes, we have lost control over our platforms. Some of us remember a time when it really was the user in control. However, there are now generations of users who simply don't care, they just want the fancy new shit that means they don't have to get off the couch.
And, so on.
(Plus, please see the aforementioned Max Headrom, by way of levity...)
Some of us have more sense than to do that.