Amazon’s Alexa told a 10-year-old girl this week to touch a penny to the exposed prongs of a charger plugged into the wall. The device seemingly pulled the challenge from an article describing it as dangerous.
According to Kristin Livdahl on Twitter, the Echo responded to “tell me a challenge to do” with “Here’s something I found on the web. According to ourcommunitynow.com: The challenge is simple: plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs.”
Amazon also received more backlash after they replied to the tweet asking for more information with users stating that they have all the info they need and shouldn’t be asking for more information.
Amazon said in a statement to the BBC that they took action as soon as they were made aware of it. “As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it.”
Livdahl later tweeted that asking for a challenge no longer works.
The Verge also noted that testing the prompt with Alexa, you are no longer able to get a similar result today, and even asking for a challenge from the web gave no response.
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