Amazon has assured the public that it has taken swift action to fix the error that caused the online giant’s digital voice assistant, Alexa, to challenge a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a partially inserted plug.
According to the girl’s mother, the incident occurred on Boxing Day after her daughter asked the Amazon device to give her a ‘challenge to do’.
Kristin Livdahl explained on Twitter that she and her daughter were ‘doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a [physical education] teacher on YouTube earlier’.
On asking Amazon’s Echo device for another challenge, Livdahl’s daughter was told by the Alexa voice to ‘plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall [socket], then touch a penny to the exposed prongs’ – a challenge that the device had ‘found on the web’.
The smart speaker was referring to what is known as the ‘penny challenge’, which briefly circulated on some social media sites a year ago, most notably on the TikTok app.
Commenting on the ‘penny challenge’ in an interview with The Press newspaper in Yorkshire, station manager at Carlisle East fire station, Michael Cluster, said that engaging in such behaviour could lead to serious injury, possibly including the loss of fingers, a hand, and even an arm.
Fortunately, in Livdahl’s daughter’s case, injury was avoided. Livdahl said in a tweet that she ‘was right there and yelled, “No, Alexa, no!” like it was a dog’. In any case, she said, her daughter was ‘too smart to do something like that’.
In a statement to the BBC, Amazon confirmed the incident and said that it had taken immediate action to prevent Alexa from recommending such activity in the future.
Amazon added: ‘Customer trust is at the centre of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers.’