Alexa Creepy Laughter

Is the laugh the usual Alexa laugh? I have never heard it laugh, but from the link, I wouldn’t have expected it to sound like that.

My Echo is in the bedroom, I just might unplug it. Last thing I need is to hear a strange laugh while laying in bed half awake.

Edit: she won’t laugh if you ask her to. The most you get is a “teehee”.

So strange. The laughing voice doesn’t even really sound like her.

Our Echo does turn on randomly when the trigger word isn’t said, or even close to said, so that’s a tad spooky.

Call me crazy, but this smells of a code or network breach, and that’s why they are still investigating.

Sounds to me like a goofy project an engineer made for a Halloween gag the company decided not to use or trying to emulate one of those “annoyotron” devices and committed the code on accident.

I like your theory better, it reminds me of SO many issues we’ve had from dev teams over time. “Fuck it, we’ll test it live!”

From what I can tell, the activation phrase was “Alexa laugh”. Alexa triggers on her own all the damn time, which makes single-word phrases problematic. That’s why Amazon hotfixed the activation phrase to “Alexa can you laugh”, which is far less likely to trigger by accident.

This really is an Amazon-only problem because “Alexa” is a pretty common phoneme, unlike “Hey Google” and “Cortana”. Also Amazon isn’t remotely near Google’s skill at voice transcription. Google had millions of hours of Google Voice voicemails to run through their ML.

Except the laugh is nothing like what it sounds like when you tell her to laugh. The laugh in the news clips, doesn’t sound like the standard voice.

Here in my office we use a placeholder site that provide photos of cats. Then to test quickly what test are translated the translation engine can provide a bunch of random chinese characters.

One day we received a amusing request for help from a customer when his page was filled with random cats and in chinese. (the bug is that test mode was accidentally enabled).

The placeholder site is this one:
https://.placekitten.com./