Amazon is reportedly working to cure the weird fits of laughter that overcome its personal assistant Alexa and creep out users.
During the past couple of weeks, some people have heard Alexa randomly start laughing at nothing at all, without being prompted.
"I didn't even know she laughed," one user wrote on Twitter. "Needless to say I unplugged my Echo and it is now sitting in the bottom of [a] box—away from me."
Another person heard the giggle at night: "Lying in bed about to fall asleep when Alexa on my Amazon Echo Dot lets out a very loud and creepy laugh," he said. "There's a good chance I get murdered tonight."
The unprompted laughter was a trending topic on Twitter for a while.
Having an office conversation about pretty confidential stuff and Alexa just laughed. Anybody else ever have that?
— David Woodland (@DavidSven) March 1, 2018
It didn't chime as if we had accidentally triggered her to wake. She simply just laughed. It was really creepy.
There was also discussion on Reddit about the spontaneous laughter. One person wrote, "The Dot we have in the master bath has twice now randomly played a track of a woman laughing at about 10 p.m. … No indication on the app that the device heard any command. We had the Dot laugh several times and it wasn't the laugh Alexa produces, but definitely sounded like a canned laugh, not like someone laughing live."
Unplugging the Alexa-enabled devices was a popular solution for those who were irked after hearing the ominous laughter. They might be able to hook those devices back up again soon: Amazon reportedly told the Verge that it was "aware of this and working to fix it."
It's not the first creepy encounter users have had with Alexa. Last year, a viral video showed a woman asking Alexa whether she was "connected to the CIA," but the Amazon Echo device stayed silent and then went to sleep without a word. The woman repeats the question, but again Alexa does not answer.
After the video spread across the internet, Amazon issued a statement in which it called the problem a "technical glitch" that it fixed, so that Alexa would reply that she works for Amazon when asked about her ties to the CIA.
