Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant recently. As it tells a 10-year-old girl to touch a live plug with a coin. Alexa suggestion came after the girl asked for a ‘’challenge to do.’’ The smart voice assistant said, ‘’ Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs,’’ The scenario was described by the girl mother on Twitter.
Kristin Livdahl said,‘’ We were doing physical challenges, like lying 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.’’ She added that’s when the Echo speaker suggested partaking in the challenge that it had found on the web. ‘’ The activity is known as ‘’ the penny challenge’’ is a dangerous one that began circulating on the famous social media site TikTok and other social sites about a year ago.
Amazon Response
Amazon took notice of the incident and said it had fixed the error. As soon as the company became aware of it, the made changes. The company told BBC in a statement that it had updated the voice assistant app. The change is made to prevent the assistant from recommending such activity in the future. Amazon said, ‘’ customer trust is at the center of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide precise, relevant, and helpful information to customers. As soon as we became aware of this mistake, we took swift action to fix it.’’
Meanwhile, the trending game is very risky. As metal conduct electricity and inserting them into live electrical sockets can cause major problems. For example, shocks, fires, and other damages. Michael Cluster, station manager at Carlisle East fire station told, the press newspaper in Yorkshire in 2020 that anyone can lose their hands, fingers and arms. The result from the game is that people will hurt and injure themselves seriously.
The mother of the kid tweeted that she intervened, yelling: No, Alexa, no!’’ However, her daughter was too smart to do something like that.’’ Since last year, social media has brought many changes to provide a safe and secure platform for young kids. For example, Instagram announced to change timings for youngsters, google, tweeter and Facebook participated and encourage a safer platform. These incidents help the tech giants to change their perspective about technology, and the future.
