Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it “challenged” a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The suggestion came after the girl asked Alexa for a “challenge to do”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs,” the smart speaker said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Amazon said it fixed the error as soon as the company became aware of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The girl’s mother, Kristin Livdahl, described the incident on Twitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She said: “We 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. Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s when the Echo speaker suggested partaking in the challenge that it had “found on the web”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The dangerous activity, known as “the penny challenge”, began circulating on TikTok and other social media websites about a year ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Metals conduct electricity and inserting them into live electrical sockets can cause electric shocks, fires and other damage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I know you can lose fingers, hands, arms,” Michael Clusker, station manager at Carlisle East fire station, told The Press newspaper in Yorkshire in 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The outcome from this is that someone will get seriously hurt.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fire officials in the US have also spoken out against the so-called challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ms Livdahl tweeted that she intervened, yelling: “No, Alexa, no!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, she said her daughter was “too smart to do something like that”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Amazon told the BBC in a statement that it had updated Alexa to prevent the assistant recommending such activity in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Customer trust is at the centre of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers,” said Amazon in a statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it “challenged” a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug. The suggestion came after the girl asked Alexa for a “challenge to do”. “Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n