This Is Why Alexa Is Laughing at You
You’re powerless to stop her. She and her ilk grow in power with each passing day.
By Brian Feldman
Over the last couple of weeks, an increasing number of users on social media have reported that their Amazon Echo devices are laughing, seemingly at them, at unexpected and unwanted times. Not a ton of people, but enough to gain some media attention, largely because it’s a fun story — the device reliant on artificial intelligence that is always listening to you developing the capacity to laugh at you to your face. It contains all of the ingredients for a minor tech panic, with ample opportunity for riffing, the kind you might see in a 60-second clip on the local news.
A day after the viral posts reached a fever pitch, Amazon produced a statement claiming that the problem was the Echo devices incorrectly hearing themselves being commanded to laugh. “We are disabling the short utterance ‘Alexa, laugh.’ We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to ‘Sure, I can laugh’ followed by laughter,” the company said in a statement.
You’ll just have to take its explanation of misheard commands at face value: None of the processing is done client-side, there is no way for third parties to look at how Alexa devices really work, to poke around in the…
