A family from Portland, USA, who owns a smart speaker Amazon Echo with built-in Alexa assistant, told KIRO 7 reporters about an unusual problem. One fine day, the couple received a strange phone call from Seattle, - one of the employees of the company owned by the head of the family called. “Immediately turn off your device with Alexa, you have been jailbroken,” he warned over the phone.
As it turned out, a strange audio file he received the day before prompted the call to an unnamed colleague from Seattle. The recording contained a normal conversation between the aforementioned spouses, clearly recorded in their home (they were discussing their own wooden floors). When the caller accurately recounted their recent conversation to the spouses, and also forwarded the same file, the victims made sure that he was not lying, rushed to disconnect all four Echo Dot devices they owned, and contacted Amazon for clarification.
After listening to the spouses' story and checking the device logs, the support engineers concluded that the incident actually took place. For some reason, the “smart” speaker recorded the conversation of its owners, and then sent it to one of the contacts. At the same time, the support team could not explain why this happened, they only assumed that the device decided that it was being addressed, misinterpreting something from what was said.
Now that this strange story made it to the press, Amazon representatives had to explain what happened in more detail. ArsTechnica journalists cite a detailed comment from the developers, which explains that the device "heard" as if someone told Alexa. After the column was activated, in the further dialogue something seemed to her like a request to send a message ("send message"). After that, the device aloud asked its owners to whom to send the message (which they obviously did not even hear), and then interpreted something from what was said as the name of a colleague from Seattle, found it in the contact list. Since the background conversation was still going on at that moment, some of what was said was then taken by the device as confirming the message was sent (the simple word "right" was enough).
The developers emphasize that what happened is a random sequence of coincidences, and this is unlikely to happen again with someone else. Nevertheless, in support of Amazon, the victims were assured that the company will take some steps so that such accidents do not recur in the future.
It is worth noting that this is not the first time that smart speakers behave strangely. For example, just a few months ago, in March 2018, Amazon device owners began to complain that the Alexa assistant suddenly started laughing, thereby scaring users in earnest. Then the Amazon developers had to release a fix to fix the problem.
