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Alexa Is Randomly Laughing and It’s Creeping People Out

Written by

Megan Johnson
Megan Johnson
Megan Johnson is a reporter in Boston. She got her start at the Boston Herald, where commenters would leave sweet messages like “Megan Johnson is just awful.” Now, she's a contributor to publications like People Magazine, Trulia and Architectural Digest.
updated May 3, 2019
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We need to talk about Alexa. The Amazon virtual assistant seems to have taken a dark turn in recent days, emitting an evil-sounding laugh to some avid users, Buzzfeed reported on Monday.

While it may seem harmless, imagine being curled up in bed about to doze off when a sinister laugh comes out of nowhere—not the most reassuring sound.

One Twitter user was able to capture the strange laugh from Alexa on video. You can hear her say “Alexa: replay” only to receive the laugh in return.

@amazonecho alone in the dark kitchen, with no trigger, a sudden creepy laugh emerges and freaks out owners #justwrong. Replay: pic.twitter.com/vR684u8mbN

— anne (@anniebonannieTN) February 21, 2018

As of Wednesday, representatives from Amazon received so much feedback about Alexa’s unprompted laughter that they released a statement recognizing the issues.

“We’re aware of this and working to fix it,” an Amazon representative said, as reported by CNBC.

But that isn’t the only Alexa issue as of late. On Friday, it was reported that she had gone silent for some users. It seems a regional outage that impacted Amazon’s servers led to the assistant’s becoming unresponsive on Echo products, prompting people to compare it to the company’s Super Bowl ad where celebrities filled in for the assistant. The Verge reported that Alexa’s quiet time was probably related to an outage of Amazon’s web services.

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