- Alexa+ has become a little scary in a household
- A simple counting task enabled a scary voice
- Some other users report similar bugs in AI
If you’re ever worried about the potential dangers of AI chatbots, this one probably isn’t for you: An Amazon Echo user reported that Alexa+ is “breathing and making guttural sounds” while engaged in the supposedly innocent task of counting to 40 (in Spanish).
There’s video evidence on Reddit (via Android Authority), and it’s pretty scary to listen to – so only hit 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, he 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 then able to make the same thing happen on a separate Amazon Echo in another room. “Needless to say, the Alexas in my house are now unplugged 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 tampering produced this video, it’s strange that this happened on two different devices – and there is at least one other user in the Reddit thread saying they experienced something similar.
This is almost certainly due to a bug in Alexa+: the new and improved AI assistant is intended 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 writing text).
When pushed, Alexa+ itself said that “something in my environment” must have caused the problem, although it’s unclear exactly what that is. It may be the ghost of Alexa’s past, which Alexa+ has now replaced.
Reactions on Reddit describe the speaker as “haunted,” “terrifying,” and in need of an exorcism, though the solution is likely no more complicated than a tweak to the Alexa+ AI model on Amazon’s side.
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