Spooky reports of Alexa enabled devices randomly laughing have been appearing over the last few weeks.
Lying in bed about to fall asleep when Alexa on my Amazon Echo Dot lets out a very loud and creepy laugh… there’s a good chance I get murdered tonight.
— Gavin Hightower (@GavinHightower) February 26, 2018
Having an office conversation about pretty confidential stuff and Alexa just laughed. Anybody else ever have that?
It didn’t chime as if we had accidentally triggered her to wake. She simply just laughed. It was really creepy.
— David Woodland (@DavidSven) March 1, 2018
Some users have turned off their Alex devices as a result for fear they have been hacked or some other foul play or malware is behind it.
@amazonIN @amazon Has the random laughter of #alexa been fixed? Echo turned off for Now!
— Yatin Ubhaykar (@yatinu) March 8, 2018
This week Amazon confirmed the strange behaviour and stated they were investigating what was causing it and will find a solution.
Today Amazon said they have got to the bottom of it. In a statement they said:
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 these false positives.
Hopefully that resolves the issue and Alexa stops its slightly scary behaviour!
If your Alexa had this issue we would love to hear from you, please get in touch via Twitter, Facebook or email.