“Scaring the daylights out of unsuspecting users”

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) In 2018, users of the still relatively-new Amazon Echo devices would occasionally hear their Alexa… laughing. It felt completely unprompted, and creepy as hell. There are so many memes and exaggerations that it is hard to find the genuine recording of the synthesized laughter, but I think this video from WTNH News8 captures what it genuinely sounded like: There’s not much to the mystery, so I’ll jump to Amazon’s explanations to the story, as excerpted in this Ars Technica article: 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.” We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to “Sure, I can laugh” followed by laughter. Combine this with potentially overeager wake words… It’s not uncommon for Echo…