If you were treated to an Amazon Echo or Echo Dot this Christmas, then you may want to think twice before letting any children play around with it. A new viral video has shown how letting a young kid ask requests of the AI personal assistant can have unfortunate consequences, with the Echo Dot’s Alexa voice recognition software mishearing a request to play nursery rhyme ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ and instead responding with an extremely explicit search result.
The child in the video asks Alexa to play ‘Twinkle Twinkle,’ before Alexa responds with the following distinctly child-unfriendly statement: “Search for porn detected. Porno ringtone hot chick amateur girl calling sexy f*** c*** s*** sex c*** p**** anal dildo ringtones for Android.” Understandably, the parents in the video rush to prevent the Echo Dot from continuing its graphic speech, unwittingly creating one of the funniest videos of the year in the process.
Check it out below:
But what happened here? Although it’s definitely hard to discern that the kid is requesting Alexa to play ‘Twinkle Twinkle,’ the AI’s response definitely doesn’t sound like what he asked her to play. The most reasonable guess right now is that Alexa misheard the young boy’s request as “dick girl, dick girl,” and therefore decided that he wanted to listen to this song on Spotify. It certainly matches the description given by Alexa, but why the device jumped to this conclusion is anyone’s guess.
While the parents in this video were probably forced to have a very uncomfortable conversation with their son after Alexa’s outburst, it should serve as a reminder to other mums and dads that, if your kid sounds like he’s shouting “dick girl” when trying to describe his favorite nursery rhyme, you probably shouldn’t put him anywhere near an Echo Dot.
