This is one category of bug that's always intrigued me - I can understand unintentional triggers of Alexa occurring (as they did with the Home mini at launch), but why are those triggers resulting in a "creepy laugh"? Is it just that we're only hearing about the unintentional triggers that result in a laugh?
I can't remember where I read it, but I remember a similar article mentioning a very interesting side effect of having decently high-fidelity microphones in these devices. They would pick up noise outside of the range of human hearing and interpret portions of it as a command. It was akin to those articles about the sort of strange phenomenon in machine learning in which computers interpret input wildly differently than humans would due to the underlying modeling the systems are subject to.<p>My guess is this is in that class of defect.
Here's a wild theory; If you wanted to test out a worm in the Alexa network & didn't want to be detected by phoning-home, wouldn't having it do something just like this to attract media attention act as a means of proving success?
I expect it is something that Alexa "hears" and that is the specific response. If you say "Alexa laugh" is that the exact sound that comes back? I will check when I get home. Mine is <i>always</i> misunderstanding what I say. So a false activation + misunderstanding would explain this.<p>Also, article says it happens often as a bizarre response to requests to turn of the lights. Maybe "lights" is being interpreted as "laugh" as in a command.
Someone in our family bought our kid one of those talking dog toys that sings, etc. One night, my wife and I were falling asleep when we heard from the shelf, "peak-a-boo, I seeee you". Terrifying, but to this day we get a good laugh out of it.
This reminds me of the hilarious Alexa AI horror shirt story someone posted in the comments here when Alexa was launched.. can’t seem to find it but it was absolutely hilarious :)