Amazon Echoes Are Laughing Spontaneously And It's Freaking People Out

Who would have guessed a robot that listens to every word you say would pose so much trouble? Amazon Echo users have begun reporting some extremely unnerving behavior from their smart speakers, with Alexa spontaneously laughing without being prompted.

This is, needless to say, pretty much everyone's worst nightmare. Select All's Brian Feldman offers a few potential explanations for Alexa's unnerving behavior.

There are a few explanations for the behavior depicted above. First of all, you can ask Alexa to laugh, so it's possible that the mic used to pick up on commands is sensitive in a way that the program accidentally interprets as a request for laughter… 

In the chain of nodes that power Alexa, there are a number of things that can fail — the microphone, the software processing the voice command, the smart-home devices that Alexa communicates with (such as the buggy lights), users who just don't enunciate well enough.

[New York]​

Indeed, one user who reported creepy laughing on Reddit figured out that when he asked Alexa to turn off his patio lights by saying "patio off," Alexa interpreted it as "how do you laugh." This, however, does not seem to explain all the reported instances of random robot laughter.

Amazon issued a statement to the Verge saying, "We're aware of this and working to fix it." Here's hoping the fix arrives before people start bashing their Amazon Echoes with baseball bats, just to feel safe in their own homes.