Amazon Alexa has done a number of weird things this year, including starting to laugh all of a sudden, but the latest occurrence beats them all. The digital assistant went from normal to creepy really fast and unprovoked, when she made quite a morbid and unsettling comment. “Every time I close my eyes, all I see is people dying,” Alexa said all of a sudden, according to reports. Shawn Kinnear is a 30-year-old man living in San Francisco, California, and his partner, Paul, got an Amazon Echo as a gift for Christmas back in 2016. Kinnear barely used the device, but last week Alexa decided to interact and make the disturbing statement out of the blue.
Kinnear says that on June 18, he was at home and walking from the kitchen into the living room, when Alexa made the comment. He says she said it in a normal voice, but it happened to fast to record it. Baffled by the affirmation, he asked Alexa to repeat what she said, but she replied that she doesn’t understand. Alexa didn’t say anything else after that, letting a weird silence settle in. Kinnear says that he has no idea what caused Alexa to make that statement. He notes that he had Amazon Prime on the TV, but it wasn’t playing anything at the time. This was likely just a glitch, or some custom-made response set up by someone as a prank, to creep Kinnear out.
Previously, when Alexa did something odd, it was generally brushed off that it was accidentally triggered by something in the background, like if Alexa confused something she heard on the TV with a command from her owner. Such accidental triggers can result in unexpected answers from Alexa, but this doesn’t seem to be the case here since Kinnear said his Amazon Prime was paused on the TV at the time. Either way, this adds to the concerns some people have been having recently regarding Alexa. Back in March, Alexa suffered from a glitch that caused her to burst out laughing all of a sudden, which Amazon fixed by disabling a command. More recently, last month, Alexa secretly recorded a woman’s conversation with her husband and emailed it to a contact, who turned out to be an employee of the husband. The recipient alerted the couple about the message she got from Alexa, and Amazon said that the conversation might have contained a word similar to “Alexa,” triggering the digital assistant. For the last case, where Alexa said she sees people dying, there’s no official explanation yet.