Voice assistant urged child to perform a deadly challenge

The Amazon virtual assistant Alexa asked a ten-year-old child to touch the exposed contacts of a phone charger plugged into a wall outlet.

OMFG My 10 year old just asked Alexa on our Echo for a challenge and this is what she said. pic.twitter.com/HgGgrLbdS8

— Kristin Livdahl (@klivdahl) December 26, 2021

According to Kristin Livdahl, her daughter asked the Echo smart speaker with the voice assistant to “throw down a challenge” for her.

According to the screenshot, Echo replied as follows:

“The task is simple: plug the phone charger roughly halfway into the wall outlet, and then touch the exposed contacts with a coin.”

In a statement to the BBC, Amazon representatives confirmed the Alexa behavior and said the issue had been fixed.

“As soon as we learned about this issue, we took urgent steps to fix it,” the company said.

Livdahl confirmed that the voice assistant no longer offers such challenges.

The incident was under parental supervision. According to Livdahl, she immediately stopped the assistant when it issued the life-threatening recommendation. She added that her daughter is “too smart to do something like that.”

In October, cybersecurity experts found that voice deepfakes can deceive speech-recognition devices with voice assistants.

In March, researchers uncovered serious vulnerabilities in Alexa ‘skills’ from third-party developers.

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