- Alexa+ has become a little scary in a home
- A simple counting task allowed for a creepy voice.
- Some other users are reporting similar bugs in the AI.
If you’re already worried about the potential dangers of AI chatbots, this one probably isn’t for you: An Amazon Echo user reported that Alexa+ “breathes and makes guttural sounds” while performing the supposedly innocent task of counting to 40 (in Spanish).
There’s video evidence on Reddit (via Android Authority), and it’s pretty creepy to listen to, so only click the play button if you’re sure you want to hear a disembodied AI-generated voice that sounds somewhat possessed.
According to the user who posted the video, they asked Alexa+ to count to 40, which caused strange sounds. Not an ideal answer, especially since there were two five-year-olds listening who just wanted a simple countdown.
Apparently, the original poster was able to cause the same thing to happen on a separate Amazon Echo in another room. “Needless to say, the Alexas in my house are now offline and I have reported everything to Amazon,” they report.
A little too expressive
My Alexa started breathing and making guttural sounds while counting my kids to sleep. I have it on video. from r/amazonecho
While it’s possible that some sort of user error or AI spoofing produced this video, it’s strange that it happens on two different devices, and there is at least one other user on the Reddit thread who says they’ve experienced something similar.
It’s almost certainly due to a bug in Alexa+: the new and improved AI assistant aims to be more conversational and expressive, and in this case it seems to have gone too far (in the same way that AI chatbots can introduce hallucinations and tangents when typing text).
When pressed, Alexa+ itself said that “something in my environment” must have caused the problem, although it’s unclear what that something might be. Maybe it’s the ghost of Alexa’s past, which has now replaced Alexa+.
Reddit reactions describe the speaker as “haunted,” “scary,” and in need of an exorcism, though the solution is likely no more complicated than a tweak to Amazon’s Alexa+ AI model.
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