Amazon's Alexa is randomly laughing at users

Users of Amazon's Echo and other devices enabled with the Alexa voice assistant have reported hearing random, unprompted laughter from the bot.

Reports first surfaced last month when a Twitter user said he was 'freaked out' when Alexa started laughing randomnly through his JBL Bluetooth speaker paired with the Echo Dot.

"I thought a kid was laughing behind me," he said.

Other users have since come forward with their own instances of random Alexa laughter. The voice assistant is programmed to laugh when a user tells the bot a joke.

The random laughter appears to most commonly occur either entirely unprompted, or when the user requests to turn off their lights.

Amazon indicated Alexa was reacting when it heard words that sounded like "Alexa, laugh".

The company said it was deploying a fix disabling that phrase and changing the command to "Alexa, can you laugh?".

This is “less likely to have false positives", Amazon said.

“We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to ‘Sure, I can laugh,’ followed by laughter," the company said.

So Alexa decided to laugh randomly while I was in the kitchen. Freaked @SnootyJuicer and I out. I thought a kid was laughing behind me. pic.twitter.com/6dblzkiQHp

— CaptHandlebar (@CaptHandlebar) February 23, 2018