Peculiar Alexa-commands: Kill your parents

users of the Amazon voice assistant, Echo have long since accustomed themselves to the strange comments of your conversation partner to Alexa. In online forums, it is reported, among many others, the recommendation to “Bring the body to the police,” and observations such as “Your father smells of elderberries”. In the spring of Alexa frightened with non-sudden, eerie laughter. And a user, the Kill device “your foster parents are” heard to say, wrote in his review on the Amazon site of a “completely new level of creepy”.

Elena Witzeck

editor in the features section.

F. A. Z.

now it turns out, is the device his kill command from the platform, Reddit, fight for her in a clear language, held in Opinion known. Since Amazon is trying his assistant casual observations, to habituate, to make it sound more spontaneous and more “human” than the information, “I don’t want answers”, multiply such Creepy.

What is the meaning of life?

it is Planned, according to the Reuters news Agency, among other things, that Alexa learns to respond to jibes and jokes with your from the Internet collected from the linguistic Repertoire. A computer program transcribed for the device is the human language, and selects the best response based on observation patterns. Meanwhile, Amazon’s Alexa has been programmed in such a way that you also to existential questions such as “What is the meaning of life?” (Answer: “it depends on the question of life: 42 is a good approximation value”) think of something – such answers are then fed into however, from human Amazon-employees.

The 500,000 euros doped “Alexa price,” the company animated by students from the computer science, chat bots, and participate in more complex discussions, this year went to a Team from the University of California. The students had lined up a Bot with more than 300,000 movie quotes. He recognizes one of them, he must select only a glib answer. For this, he uses newspaper articles, Wikipedia, and movie databases.