It’s great that voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa are always-listening which means that we don’t have to press a button to activate it, thus making it easier to issue commands without having to get up from our seat. Unfortunately it seems that the always-listening feature has a downside, as many Alexa owners quickly discovered.
According to a report from The CW6 (via Mashable), it seems that during a news broadcast, a TV anchor was reporting on how a child ordered herself a $160 dollhouse through the Amazon Echo, in which the anchor added, “I love the little girl, saying ‘Alexa ordered me a dollhouse.’’ Like we said, with Alexa always listening, it seems that it picked up the phrase and assumed it was a command from their user.
Thankfully Amazon has a policy in which they say that accidental physical orders can be returned for free. In the meantime Amazon has also stated that there are ways to prevent such accidents/mistakes from happening in the future, such as turning off the ability to make purchases via voice, or requiring a confirmation code.
Hopefully in the future these accidents can be prevented with maybe voice recognition, where the voice assistants will only activate when it recognizes your voice.
Filed in Alexa, Amazon and Social Hit.
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