Amazon’s ‘Alexa’ that is, its voice assistant, ‘challenged’ a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug.
Why did Amazon’s Alexa ask he 10 year old to put the coin to the exposed electrical plug?
The prompt came up after the girl asked Alexa for a ”challenge to do”.
Alex replied with, “Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs,” the smart speaker said – BBC.
Amazon said that they had fixed the error as soon as they became aware of it.
The mother to the young girl, Kristin Livadahl, described the situation on twitter saying that they were doing some physical challenges like laying down and rolling over, holding a shoe on their feet from a physical education teacher on Youtube.
She shared that the weather was bad and that was why they had been inside .
They wanted another challenge and that’s when they asked the Echo Speaker to suggest something they could do. The speaker suggested partaking in the challenge that it had found on the web, reported Dailymail.
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The dangerous activity, known as “the penny challenge”, began circulating on TikTok and other social media websites about a year ago.
Metals conduct electricity and inserting them into live electrical sockets can cause electric shocks, fires and other damage.
Amazon told the BBC in a statement that it had updated Alexa to prevent the assistant recommending such activity in the future.