- Alexa+ has gotten a little scary in one household
- A simple counting task enabled an eerie voice
- Some other users are reporting similar errors in AI
If you’re already worried about the potential dangers of AI chatbots, this one probably isn’t for you: one Amazon Echo user has reported Alexa+ “breathing and making guttural noises” while engaged in the supposedly innocent task of counting to 40 (in Spanish).
There’s video evidence on Reddit (via Android Authority ), and it’s pretty creepy to listen to — so only click the play button if you’re sure you want to hear an unalloyed AI-generated voice that sounds somewhat possessed.
According to the user who posted the video, they asked Alexa+ to count up to 40, which gave rise to the strange noises. It’s not an ideal answer, especially since there were two five-year-olds listening who just wanted a simple countdown.
Apparently the original poster was then able to get the same thing to happen on a separate Amazon Echo in another room. “Needless to say, the Alexas in my house are now disconnected and I’ve reported the whole thing to Amazon,” they report.
A little too expressive
My Alexa started breathing and making guttural noises as she counted my children to sleep. I have it on video. from r/amazonecho
While it’s possible that some sort of user error or AI fake produced this video, it’s odd that it would happen on two different devices — and there’s at least one other user in the Reddit thread who says they’ve experienced something similar.
This is almost certainly due to a flaw in Alexa+: the new and upgraded AI assistant is meant to be more conversational and expressive, and in this case it seems to have gone too far (in the same way that AI chatbots can introduce hallucinations and tangents when typing text).
When pushed, Alexa+ itself said that “something in my environment” must have caused the error, though it’s not clear what that might be. Perhaps it is the ghost of Alexa past that Alexa+ has now replaced.
Reddit reactions describe the speaker as “haunted,” “scary,” and in need of an exorcism, though the fix is likely no more complicated than a tweak to the Alexa+ AI model on Amazon’s part.
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