Voice assistants
Life-threatening challenge: Alexa advises ten-year-olds to put metal in the socket
Amazon Echo always listens – unless you turn off the microphone.
© Alexander Heinl // Picture Alliance
Amazon goes to great lengths to make its language assistant particularly suitable for children. Now Alexa has made a pretty blatant mistake in the USA.
Dealing with voice assistants is literally child’s play. As soon as a child is able to speak clearly enough, they can also start giving first commands to Alexa and Co. And about asking about the pacifier. In the USA, however, Amazon’s assistant had a serious dropout – and advised a child to behave in a life-threatening manner.
The girl’s mother, Kristin Livdahl, reports on Twitter. “We tried some physically challenging exercises like lying on your back and twisting while holding one foot,” she recalls. “We got it from a sports teacher on Youtube. The weather was bad. And she was supposed to do another exercise.” So ten year old Alexa asked about it. “Name me a challenge that I can do,” she said to Amazon’s speaker, Echo. And it delivered, but differently than hoped.
Shock challenge
Because Alexa had a literal shock proposal ready. “The challenge is simple: half plug a charging cable into the socket. Now take a coin and hold it to the half-protruding prongs,” says the response documented on Twitter as a screenshot from the Alexa app. The mother reacted very quickly. “I just shouted, ‘No, Alexa, no.’ As if she were a dog. ” Her daughter would probably not have tried it anyway: “She says she’s too smart to do something stupid,” the mother reassures the readers.
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How exactly the highly problematic proposal came about has not yet been officially confirmed. In response, Alexa emphasizes that she found the challenge on a website; in fact, the dangerous campaign last year went viral as the “Penny Challenge” at Tiktok, among others. Even then, attention was drawn to dangers such as burns, electric shocks and possible fire hazards.
Fast reaction
Amazon seems to have already fixed the bug. Shortly after the tweet was distributed, the social media team contacted the mother and asked to be contacted. Compared to the “BBC”, the company stated that it had dissuaded Alexa as quickly as possible with an update of such proposals. “As soon as we became aware of the error, we acted quickly to repair it,” emphasized the group. In fact, soon after they were first reported, tweets sent to Livdahl reported that they were unable to reproduce the recommendation.
For Amazon, the dangerous dropout is likely to be more than annoying. “The trust of our customers is at the center of everything we do,” emphasized the group to the “BBC”. “And Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information.” This time it almost backfired.