While the cat’s away, the Amazon AI speaker will play [on its own]
One man’s Amazon AI speaker, Alexa, decided to groove out in the wee hours of the morning.
Besides being a sentence I never thought I’d right, it sounds like a possible comedy script for a film.
But this plot is actually the reality of Oliver Haberstroh, who resides in Hamburg, Germany.
Haberstroh reports that his Alexa-enabled speaker started playing music between 01:50am and 3:00am, when nobody was home.
Even better is the fact that neighbours complained about the noise, forcing police to intervene. Imagine being on that ‘mission,’ knocking on the door of someone you think is unruly, having to break down said door because no one is answering -only to find no one; No one but a speaker, that is. What a time to be alive!
It gets better!
Now, imagine coming home to find a new lock on your door and going down to the police station to retrieve your new set of keys along with an invoice.
“While I was relaxed and enjoying a beer, Alexa managed on her own, without command and without me using my mobile phone, to switch on at full volume and have her own party in my apartment,” he wrote on Facebook.
Although Amazon has offered to cover Mr. Haberstroh’s bill, they claim that Alexa didn’t malfunction, but was “remotely activated.”
“Working directly with the customer, we have identified the reason for the incident,” the company told the Inquirer.
“Echo (Speaker) was remotely activated and the volume increased through the customer’s third party mobile music-streaming app.”
If this is AI ‘malfunctioning’ we may be moving away from the feared “I, Robot” situation and move towards “I, rave” instead.
I wonder what music the Amazon Ai speaker Alexa was jamming?!
