“All I See is People Dying”, said Alexa

“Every time I close my eyes, all I see is people dying”, said the Amazon Alexa to Shawn Kinnear, a 30-year old resident of California. Shawn and his partner Paul, were gifted an Amazon Echo back in Christmas 2016. While Kinnear seldom used the device, seems like Alexa decided to break the silence this time.

On June 18, as Kinnear recalls, he was walking from the kitchen into the living room when Alexa, in a normal voice made the comment. Surprised by the eerie comment, Shawn asked Alexa to repeat what she said, but she replied that she doesn’t understand. Kinnear also added that he has Amazon Prime on the TV but there was nothing playing on it when Alexa made the comment.

This is not the first time that Alexa has glitched. Most times due to misinterpretation of certain words as “trigger words” leading to Alexa perform certain actions. But in this case, there was no conversation for Alexa to misinterpret words from. Kinnear says that there was no interaction from his side to Alexa’s comment was totally baffling as it came out of the blue. Last month, Alexa ended up recording a conversation between a wife and husband and sending it to an employee of her husband. They had no idea this had happened until the employee called them up and alerted them that they might have been hacked. According to Amazon officials, this was a case of misheard words. There was another glitch that led to Alexa bursting our laughing out of nowhere which Amazon fixed after it came to light.

This incident seems quite eerie. Even if Alexa was mistakenly triggered, what caused her to illicit such a morbid and scary response? Or was it just a movie line that she was quoting? Or did Alexa predict the future? Skynet much?

Source | Via