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Comment by michael_j_ward | Hacker News Reader

I received one of these messages just a week ago. Alexa sent me a message of my friend and his girlfriend having a private conversation. I immediately texted him to ask if he intended to do that and he did not- so weird.

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Can you explain a bit more. What was the context of the message? was it an email? What was the subject line and the text? Was the audio an attachment or a link? A link to where...?

"Amazon sent me a message" is so frustratingly vague...

You're able to send voice messages to other people that have an Alexa. Basically like voicemail.

That means that, unlike butt-dialing, you're more likely to accidentally send a message to someone you're actually talking about since the person's name is part of the command. Yikes!

Is this something you have to actively set up or does it come enabled by default?

Yea, I wish the girl mentioned what the message started with. Something had to have been misinterpreted as a voice command and a contact name ... and the device UI has to be broken to the point where it doesn't give you any audio acknowledgement or confirmation.

Alexa has voice messaging built in to the device/Alexa app. You receive a notification in the app and can ask your device to play it.

Supposing that you're not tasked with resolving this problem for Amazon, why would those details matter?

So that we consumers can better understand this potentially huge vulnerability to determine if it's a bug, a "bug-feature", user error, user lying, or Amazon actually doing something evil.

Do you have any proof of this online or can you provide more specific details? Not that I don't trust you but I don't trust anything I read on the internet without a minor amount of verification.

I'm sure another anecdote from a stranger won't be enough to convince you, but this also happened to a friend of mine just last week. A work contact of his received a voicemail from him which consisted of police sirens and muffled shouting. Of course he panicked thinking something bad had happened. Turns out my friend's Alexa had picked up a police show on the TV in the same room.

HN comments are full of unverifiable anecdotes like GP.

Since Alexa wasn't originally available in my country, I setup a whole separate account for "Alexa LastName" in the US with alexa@mydomain.com as the email address.

Now that Alexa is available in my country, I've considered switching it over to a real account explicitly to be able to use some of these calling and messaging features. Maybe I'll wait till the bugs are worked out.

Do you have to link your phone number to Alexa?

i believe that it requires an account with amazon.

i would assume that the profile for even a free amazon account would require a phone number.

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