Amazon Echo and Google Home A.I. assistant devices are scaring their owners with unprompted statements.
Cocaine, Reefer and the F-Word: Sometimes Alexa and
Google Home Go a Little Crazy
Amazon’s Echo device and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Home can
handle a growing array of tasks—they are also freaking people out
Smart devices, such as Amazon’s Echo, which uses the
Alexa voice assistant, are growing in popularity. ANDREW BURTON/BLOOMBERG NEWS
By Katherine Bindley Oct. 8, 2018 11:24 a.m. ET
Rheganne Mooradian was sitting on her bed crying one day
after having just quit her job, listening to music, when she said she heard a
voice tell her, “It’s going to be OK.” The words might have been comforting had
she not heard them from Alexa— Amazon.com Inc.’s voice assistant which powers
the Echo Dot speaker on her nightstand.
“I unplugged her instantly and I literally ran downstairs
and shoved her in a drawer,” said Ms. Mooradian, 24, who lives in Albuquerque,
N.M. “I was just like, whoa, this is not normal. She’s not supposed to do
that.”
Smart speakers such as Amazon’s Echo and Alphabet Inc.’s
Google Home products can handle a growing array of tasks from playing music to
adjusting the thermostat to arming a security system.
They are also sometimes freaking people out, seeming to
drop into conversations uninvited, playing music unprompted in the middle of
the night, turning on other gadgets at random and acting generally, well,
possessed.
Companies say there are reasonable explanations, such as
the device mishearing its “wake word”—which it recognizes to start listening to
commands. But such episodes can leave owners shaken and unsure of what to do
next. Chalk it up to a misunderstanding? Reboot? Put the device in time out?
Ms. Mooradian eventually took the Echo Dot out of the
drawer. “I let her sit in there a while, for a couple days, and then I was
like, OK, that’s enough and brought her back,” she said.
She says there was no record of a command in the Alexa
history, so what happened remains a mystery.
Amazon said it could offer tech support. Ms. Mooradian
declined.
She has taken to leaving the device unplugged unless
she’s using it: “I’m just a little bit more cautious,” she said.
Amazon’s Echo and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Home products
are only getting more popular. In the second quarter of 2018, 24% of U.S. homes
had a smart speaker, up from 22% in the first quarter, according to Nielsen’s
MediaTech Trender Survey.
Wanda McDaniel, 63, received a Google Home Mini for
Christmas from her daughter. She used it without incident until August, when
she was watching TV and the machine announced it had set a 1 p.m. alarm—for
“cocaine and reefer.”
“My thought was, somebody in the neighborhood is setting
up a drug deal and for some reason this information is coming to my Google,”
said Mrs. McDaniel, who works as a cashier. “I was a little bit afraid.”
Mrs. McDaniel’s husband, Calvin McDaniel, heard the same
thing: “I jumped up. What’s this, a dope deal?”
The family’s Google Home activity revealed a pastor on
television had said, “They lose their love for cocaine and reefer” while
speaking about spirituality and addiction. The words “They lose” may have
sounded enough like the words “Hey Google” to wake the device up.
“In very rare instances, the Google Home may experience
what we call a ‘false accept.’ This means that there was some noise or words in
the background that our software interpreted to be the hotword (‘OK Google’ or
‘Hey Google’),” a Google spokesman said. “We work very hard to help to prevent
against this, and have a number of protections in place.”
Neva and Rick Sprung of St. Louis were visiting family
last winter when a man’s voice suddenly came from the Echo speaker, spewing
expletives.
“It was very strange but it was ‘f—, f—, f—, f—,’” said
Mrs. Sprung, 65. “There might have been some F-yous in there. It was just a
straight effing rant.”
Alexa’s history showed the Echo heard instructions to
“play another person.” It chose a track called “Another Person,” which indeed
features the F-word multiple times.
The couple doesn’t own a smart speaker, and the
experience hasn’t changed that. “We’ll probably never get one,” Mrs. Sprung
said.
“The device detects the wake word by identifying acoustic
patterns that match the wake word, and will only respond after it is detected,”
an Amazon spokesman said. “In rare cases, Echo devices will wake up due to a
word in background conversation sounding like ‘Alexa’ or the chosen wake word.”
Last spring, Alexa was creeping people out by randomly
laughing; it turned out the device was too easily mishearing the command “Alexa
laugh.” Amazon changed it to, “Alexa, can you laugh?”
Kristen Harris, 22, a student at Sam Houston State
University in Huntsville, Texas, was in bed one night when she heard music from
her bathroom, where she keeps her Google Home Mini.
“I get up and open the door and ‘Chandelier’ by Sia is
just playing so loudly and I’m like, uh, I didn’t tell you to do this, Google,”
she said.
The music suddenly stopped, so Ms. Harris went back to
bed. Ten minutes later, the song started again. She went into the bathroom, and
the music stopped.
“This continues on for two more nights and I think I’m
going crazy, or this thing is actually possessed,” she said.
Ms. Harris relayed the issue to her roommate—who
confessed to pranking her by controlling the music from her phone through the
shared Wi-Fi network.
“I felt dumb for actually thinking it was possessed or
something but it was a good joke,” said Ms. Harris. “I had to give her credit
for it.”
Wendy Crocker, 55, who lives near Bath in the U.K.,
initially didn’t like the Google Home her husband bought because it wouldn’t
respond to her voice; she liked it less after waking up one night in April to
voices downstairs.
“It was quite alarming,” said Mrs. Crocker. “I pondered
it a bit. Is this some intruder?”
She decided people burgling a house wouldn’t talk so
loud, so she went to investigate. She found the lights and TV on. Mrs. Crocker
says she had turned everything off and was the last one to bed. Her husband was
asleep, so she blamed the Google Home.
“I thought, well, if it’s going to have a mind of its own
and do what it wants when it wants, I’m going to get rid of it,” she said. Mrs.
Crocker told her husband the next morning there was room for only one woman in
their marriage and the device better behave.
A Google spokesman said Google Home can be accessed by
other people on an account or Wi-Fi network, and smart-home products might be
triggered by their own apps.
Alan Crocker, 55, who works as an IT support manager, was
unfazed.
“Things happen with IT,” he said. His wife, too, has
moved on.
“Given it was a one off, it hasn’t really bothered me and
I’m kind of warming to it,” she said. “It’s becoming quite useful.”
Appeared in the October 9, 2018, print edition as 'Is
There Someone in the Kitchen? Phew, It’s Just Alexa Acting Out.'
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