Amazon engineers think they have figured out the problem.
“In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase ‘Alexa, laugh,’” said the company in an email statement. “We are changing that phrase to be ‘Alexa, can you laugh?’ which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance ‘Alexa, laugh.’”
So the robots are not becoming self aware as some people thought but this still does bring up a problem for the tech industry. As technology keeps advancing, bugs like this are harder to catch.
While some robotic laugher might unsettle some users, Alexa has access to so many different aspects of our lives and a small bug could lead to substantial complications.
You can read more about the topic at the link below along with some interesting user experiences.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/business/alexa-laugh-amazon-echo.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FAmazon.com%20Inc.&action=click&contentCollection=business®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection