By Tim Binnall
Amazon's wildly popular personal assistant Alexa is raising eyebrows once again after a stunned mother took to social media claiming that the device challenged her ten-year-old daughter to stick a coin into an electrical socket! Posting on Twitter this past weekend, an understandable concerned Kristin Livdahl revealed the unsettling instructions that came from her Echo speaker. Explaining that she and her daughter had been doing physical challenges to pass the time due to bad weather outside, the miffed mom said that they turned to Alexa for potential ideas and the device offered a stunning suggestion.
According Livdahl, when they asked the Echo for a challenge, the device responded with "here's something I found on the web" and then it told them to "plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs." As one might imagine, the mom could not believe what she was hearing and, in retrospect, expressed relief that "I was right there to say 'no,' but I hope my daughter would have checked in with me anyway before trying it." Livdahl's story has since gone viral and Amazon reportedly indicated that they have excised the dangerous challenge from the Alexa system.
The troubling incident is not the first time that Alexa has wound up in the news by way of some odd statements or unnerving behavior. Back in 2018, multiple users reported hearing a creepy laugh coming from their device. A few weeks later, the personal assistant was 'caught' giving a conspiratorial answer to the question of 'what are chemtrails' when it replied that they are "chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials." When word of the very weird response spread online, Amazon quickly changed it to a prosaic explanation for the controversial phenomenon.