Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to touch a penny into plug socket

The mother of a young girl in America has revealed how Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, instructed her 10-year-old daughter to do something which could have resulted in a nasty accident, or worse.

As Kristin Livdahl explained, the incident occurred when they had bad weather outside and decided to ask the Amazon Echo smart speaker to suggest a physical challenge the family could engage in to pass the time. Tweeting a screenshot from the activity log, Kristin showed Alexa’s reply.

When her 10-year-old daughter asked Alexa, the voice, citing a third-party website, told her, “The challenge is simple: plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs”.

Alexa had clearly been referring to last year’s ridiculous ‘penny challenge’ that became popular on sites like TikTok. Once it started spreading, firefighters had to issue warnings to people not to try this stupid challenge as one bad spark could cause damage to their electrical systems, or even start a fire.

Kristin promptly made a complaint to Amazon, who in a statement said, “Customer trust is at the centre of everything we do, and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers. As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it”, as reported by uk.yahoo.com.

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