Over the past couple of weeks, the world got a brief taste of what it might be like living in a world where computers were sentient. For those who are wondering what we’re talking about, Amazon Alexa users were discovering that the digital assistant would spontaneously burst into laughter.This was extremely creepy given that it can happen seemingly out of the blue, or does it? Turns out maybe not because according to a report from GeekWire, they quote an Amazon spokesperson as offering them an explanation of why it has been happening. Apparently it seems that it is due to Alexa misunderstanding certain commands, which in turn has prompted it to laugh.
The statement reads, “In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase ‘Alexa, laugh. We are changing that phrase to be ‘Alexa, can you laugh?’ which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance ‘Alexa, laugh.’” In addition to this, Amazon also adds, “We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to ‘Sure, I can laugh’ followed by laughter.”
The company had previously acknowledged the “bug” and said it would be looking into a fix, which we guess is what was mentioned in the statement above. Hopefully that will put an end to it, but was the laugh track even necessary to begin with?
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