Alexa’s evil laugh: Amazon is working on a solution

For some hours, quite unusual news has been making the rounds on the net. Alexa, the voice assistant of Amazon, would be scaring its owners by surprising them in the middle of the night with a laugh. A rather disturbing laugh.

The crime was reported by several users, who would have unintentionally triggered the command “Laugh, Alexa” by giving simple orders, such as to turn off the lights in the house or one of the electronic devices nearby. The “bug”, or alleged bug, was reported to the company Jeff Bezos, which has promptly prepared a fix that will disable the voice assistant’s devilish laugh – or rather, make it less alarming.

No, Alexa isn’t planning your murder.

The reason that would push Alexa to emit this distressing laugh is to be found in the software itself of the personal assistant. In fact, the latter would often confuse some commonly used phrases and words with the command “Alexa, laugh”, thus triggering the sneer that has scared several English-speaking users in the last few hours.

Amazon’s solution consists of a simple, but effective modification to the aforementioned command. “Alexa, laugh” will then be changed to “Alexa, can you laugh?”. Not only that, but the assistant’s response will also be changed, so Alexa will respond to the user with “Sure, I can laugh”, before playing the laugh.

Needless to say, over the past few hours, the whole Alexa thing has taken turns that are as disturbing as it is hilarious. On Twitter, the crime quickly conquered trends, with numerous users making Amazon’s voice assistant laugh – voluntarily or otherwise – to record its disturbing results. User @CaptHandlebar was one of the first to report the bug, with a tweet posted on February 22.

So Alexa decided to laugh randomly while I was in the kitchen. Freaked @SnootyJuicer and I out. I thought a kid was laughing behind me. pic.twitter.com/6dblzkiQHp

– CaptHandlebar (@CaptHandlebar) February 23, 2018

Waiting for the update prepared by Amazon you could also have fun trying to make people laugh Alexa with devices from the Echo range – just try not to do this during the night, if you don’t want to scare the neighbors.