Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after a “smart” home assistant “challenged” a 10-year-old girl to place a coin between the teeth of a plug partially plugged into the outlet.
The proposal came after the girl asked Alexa “a challenge to do”, the BBC reported. “Plug the phone charger halfway into the socket, then touch a coin to the exposed teeth,” said the smart speaker.
Amazon, for its part, was quick to assure that it had rectified the error as soon as the company learned of the incident.
The girl’s mother, Kristin Livdal, described the incident on Twitter. “We did some challenging physical exercises, such as lying down and rolling over, holding an object on our feet.” It was bad outside. The child just wanted another exercise.
Then the clever voice assistant offered the girl to take part in the challenge he “found online”. The dangerous experiment, known as the “coin challenge”, began circulating on TikTok and other social media about a year ago.
The experiment is dangerous for both people and homes: it can lead to electric shocks, fires and various damages. “I know you can lose fingers, palms, whole hands,” said Michael Clusker, manager of the Carlisle East Fire Department. U.S. firefighters have also spoken out against the so-called challenge.
Amazon claims to have updated Alexa so that the assistant can no longer recommend such dangerous activities in the future. “Customer trust is at the heart of everything we do, and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant and useful information to customers,” the statement said.
“As soon as we found out about this mistake, we took quick action to correct it,” said the online commerce giant.
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