We definitely won't be sleeping tonight.
Amazon have said that they are "working to fix" a glitch in Alexa devices after social media users said it started laughing randomly.
The housing voice assistant is designed to respond to commands when the user says a wake word, like Amazon or Alexa.
But according to social media reports, people have started hearing strange and unprompted laughter from their devices.
Some people have even begun to record the laugher and shared it only. We're not sure if it's to share the creepiness/prove it did happen, or simply to terrify us all.
https://twitter.com/CaptHandlebar/status/966838302224666624
Some people took to social media to claim that the laughter happened when they asked Alexa to play music or turn off the lights.
One person claimed that they would have preferred the laughter to what their Alexa did: listing off cemeteries nearby.
Others said that it happened totally out of the blue - which, to us, is even more terrifying.
https://twitter.com/GavinHightower/status/967999257398702083
https://twitter.com/RagglefraggleXD/status/971534905783062529?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fwires%2Fpa%2Farticle-5477025%2FAmazon-works-fix-complaints-Alexa-s-creepy-laugh.html
https://twitter.com/ddanielclemens/status/971273132253302786
https://twitter.com/Nouders/status/968764922652975104
https://twitter.com/HeyItsKamo/status/971417403463798784
https://twitter.com/kaitlinmonte/status/969624336104611840
https://twitter.com/DavidSven/status/969353683350667266
https://twitter.com/taylorkatelynne/status/970738507718283265
And then there was the guy who tried to get Alexa to answer just
why she was laughing at people. Even that didn't quite work.
https://twitter.com/nfoust412/status/971623026344198144
But there's apparently an innocent explanation for it all - so the end may not be here
just yet.
An Amazon spokesperson told the
Daily Mail:
"We’re aware of this and working to fix it.
“In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase ‘Alexa, laugh’.
“We are changing that phrase to be ‘Alexa, can you laugh?’ which is less likely to have false positives, and 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.”
