Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant is known to be pretty impressive. You can ask Alexa just about anything, and she'll typically give you a decent answer. But the device just did something really strange and dangerous that has Amazon apologizing and customers everywhere wondering what she might say next.
The company issued an apology after a mom said that her Alexa device told her 10-year-old daughter to place a coin on an exposed electrical outlet. On Sunday, that mom, Kristin Livdahl, tweeted a screenshot of the mind-boggling interaction between her daughter and an Amazon Echo smart speaker.
More from LittleThings: 18-Year-Old Quadruple Amputee Becomes Internet Famous For Her Impressive Makeup Tutorials
The device's activity log showed the interaction. Alexa told the little girl to "plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny" to its exposed prongs.
The girl's mother was pretty shocked by the interaction. "OMFG My 10 year old just asked Alexa on our Echo for a challenge and this is what she said," she wrote in her tweet.
According to the screenshot, Alexa gave the child 20 seconds to perform the task. It sounds completely bizarre, but the company explained how it happened. When the girl asked for a "challenge," the algorithm searched the internet. It got its response from the website Our Community Now.
The site had a story up that was actually warning parents about the social media challenge. It seemed Alexa scanned the article due to the word "challenge."
Amazon told People magazine that it has already corrected the issue. "Customer trust is at the center of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers," a spokesperson told the outlet. "As soon as we became aware of this error, we quickly fixed it, and are taking steps to help prevent something similar from happening again."
As for the worried mom, she says it's a pretty good reminder not to do what robots tell you to do. She made sure her daughter understood that. "We had another conversation about not trusting things from the internet," she later said, "or Alexa."
