Alexa is one of Amazon's main products and has a very important presence on all its devices. The voice assistant of the company founded by Jeff Bezos has become one of the main references in the field, but in recent days it has been mired in controversy. Why? Because he challenged a 10-year-old girl to touch a wall socket with a coin .
According to BBC News, the unexpected situation occurred when Kristin Livdahl and her daughter were doing physical exercises following guides on YouTube, to spend a day of bad weather. When the girl asked her Amazon Echo speaker to recommend another challenge to complete , Alexa replied that she had found one on the web.
“Plug a phone charger halfway into a wall outlet, then tap a penny on the exposed pins” , the virtual assistant explained. The mother of the minor shared a screenshot on her Twitter account that corroborates what Alexa said. The publication already has more than 2,500 retweets and almost 14 thousand Likes since it was published on April 26.
Fortunately the episode did not happen to adults . Livdahl explained that when Amazon's software recommended the dangerous challenge she yelled “No, Alexa, no!” to the speaker. Even in one of the many responses to her tweet, she indicated that the girl herself mentioned that “she was too smart to do something like that, anyway.”
Amazon releases an update so that Alexa does not recommend challenges of this type again
As soon as the story was made public, Amazon released an update so that Alexa no longer recommends these types of challenges. “Customer trust is at the core of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant and useful information to customers. As soon as we become aware of this error we take quick action to fix it,” the company told BBC News.
Other users quickly shared screenshots showing that making the same request to Alexa no longer returned any results . This means that the update was really effective. However, the incident exposes that tools are still needed so that the little ones are not exposed to the challenges of social networks.
The controversial recommendation made by Alexa, based on a result obtained in ourcommunitynow.com, went viral on TikTok. Since 2020, a large number of videos have been published replicating this challenge, known as “the penny challenge”. It is certainly not the first time that something of this kind has happened with the popular ByteDance app.
