Buzzfeed:
Owners of Amazon Echo devices with the voice-enabled assistant Alexa have been pretty much creeped out of their damn minds recently. People are reporting that the bot sometimes spontaneously starts laughing — which is basically a bloodcurdling nightmare.
Step through the article, read the tweets. This has all the elements of a next-gen horror movie. I can’t help but wonder if there’s IoT hacking going on here, if there’s not someone having a good laugh over this.
Or ghosts. Yeah, probably ghosts.
Pretty creepy. I haven’t had this happen with my Alexa yet, but I did go out to the garage to find my stereo turned on yesterday, when I know it was off the night before. Alexa rocking to some Meshuggah when I’m not home?
Really though, I don’t want Siri, Alexa or any future AI to try to be human. Nobody is doing this well and probably won’t for years. Better off to just let the machine act like a machine instead of that annoying friend who tries to be clever but it never quite hits the mark.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. I hear people love this sort of invasive creepiness as long as it’s a free service and the device is cheap enough to qualify as an impulse purchase.
shockingly, the security on a $40 loss leader bit of tech is utter crap.
Seriously. How long before they start receiving baby-monitor chatter?
I particularly like the tweet that says “Having an office conversation about pretty confidential stuff”… in the presence of an always-on microphone connected to the Web.
I’d like to know what company that took place at, so I can make certain they have none of my data.
Google Home is little better. “Alarm set for 5:30 AM.” Had I not been present to cancel it, we would have thought the smoke alarm or similar was going off at some ungodly hour.