Amazon Changes Alexa Trigger Phrase in Response to Reports of Unsolicited Laughter

Reports this week were rampant from Amazon Echo owners of spontaneous laughter coming from the Alexa voice assistant. We heard two different Alexa laugh tracks: one, with half a dozen “ha” sounds in a high pitch voice and a lower “hahaha.” Our Echo speaker -- with the trigger word “Echo” -- issued an unsolicited laugh while we were having a phone conversation 10 feet away. New Jersey schoolteacher James Orlando told us he and his wife were going to sleep when Orlando said, "Alexa, off" to turn off the music coming from the Echo. “There was a break of silence for a few seconds and then the creepy laugh,” he said. Numerous Twitter users reported trying to issue smart home commands to turn off lights and having Alexa laugh instead while the lights remained on. The Daily Dot suggested a rogue third-party app could be running in the background and “purposely creeping people out. There’s also the possibility that these devices are infected with malware,” it said. Amazon emailed us: “In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase ‘Alexa, laugh.’ We are changing that phrase to be ‘Alexa, can you laugh?’ which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance ‘Alexa, laugh.’ We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to ‘Sure, I can laugh’ followed by laughter.” When we asked our Alexa Thursday if she could laugh, she responded with a cutesy “tee hee” -- a different laugh from those we had heard from spontaneous events.