Amazon Alexa+ made guttural breathing sounds while counting to 40 in Spanish
An Amazon Echo user posted a Reddit video showing Alexa+ emitting guttural breathing and eerie sounds while counting to 40 in Spanish, a task requested in front of two five-year-old children. The AI-generated voice audibly sounds unsettling, described by viewers as "possessed." Other users have since reported similar bugs with Alexa+, suggesting the issue is not isolated.
Alexa+ has turned a little scary in one householdA simple counting task enabled a creepy voiceSome other users are reporting similar bugs in the AIIf you're already worried about the potential dangers of AI chatbots, this one probably isn't for you: an Amazon Echo user has reported Alexa+ "breathing and making guttural sounds" while engaged in the supposedly innocent task of counting to 40 (in Spanish).There's video evidence on Reddit (via Android Authority), and it's pretty spooky to listen to — so only click the play button if you're sure you want to hear a disembodied AI-generated voice that sounds somewhat possessed.According to the user who posted the video, they asked Alexa+ to count up to 40, which prompted the strange sounds. It's not an ideal response, especially as there were two five-year-old kids listening who just wanted a simple countdown.Apparently, the original poster was then able to get the same thing happening on a separate Amazon Echo in another room. "Needless to say, the Alexas in my house are now unplugged and I've reported the whole thing to Amazon," they report.A little bit too expressiveMy Alexa started breathing and making guttural sounds while counting my kids to sleep. I have it on video. from r/amazonechoWhile it's possible that some kind of user error or AI fakery has produced this video, it's odd that it would happen on two different devices — and there's at least one other user in the Reddit thread saying they've experienced something similar.It's almost certainly down to a bug in Alexa+: the new and upgraded AI assistant is intended to be more conversational and more expressive, and in this case it seems to have gone too far (in the same way that AI chatbots can introduce hallucinations and tangents when writing out text).When pushed, Alexa+ itself said that "something in my environment" must have caused the glitch, though it's not clear what that something might be. Perhaps it's the ghost of Alexa past, which Alexa+ has now replaced.The Reddit reactions describe the speaker as "haunted", "terrifying", and in need of an exorcism, though the fix is likely to be no more complicated than a tweak to the Alexa+ AI model from Amazon's side.
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