By Paul Waldmiller
Did you know that Amazon is now taking steps to prevent errors on Alexa-enabled devices?
A recent interaction between a 10-year-old girl and an Amazon device caused the girl’s mother to tweet out a concern. According to Kristin Livdahl, her Amazon Echo smart speaker told her daughter to place a coin in an electrical outlet.
Also, according to the tweet sent out by the child’s mother, the Amazon echo device instructed her daughter to take a harmful act in the form of a “challenge.” The mom’s tweet went viral and sometime later an Amazon employee tweeted back to her, asking her to contact Amazon directly.
Amazon released a statement regarding the incident. According to multiple sources, Amazon stated that, “Customer trust is at the center of everything we do, and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and help information to customers,”
“As soon as we became aware of this error, we quickly fixed it and are taking steps to help prevent something similar from happening again.”
In the past few years, Amazon has been sued by both (former) employees as well by states. Employees suing because of unsafe working conditions, and various states suing Amazon for selling unsafe products.