Amazon Alexa is Daring Children to Perform DANGEROUS Life Threatening ‘Challenge’

Amazon Alexa is Daring Children to Perform DANGEROUS Life Threatening 'Challenge'

Amazon was forced to update the settings on its Alexa voice assistant after it reportedly dared a 10 year old child to perform a dangerous, life-threatening “challenge.”

A mother and her 10 year old daughter were just hanging out during Christmas break, and had apparently decided to perform physical challenges around the house.

“We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a [Phys.] Ed teacher on YouTube earlier. Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one,” the mother recounted.

After they had run out of ideas, the child asked the family’s Amazon Echo Dot device to suggest another “challenge to do.”

Responding to her prompt, Alexa suggested that the child “plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs.”

This “challenge” came from yet another dangerous TikTok trend in 2020. The “penny challenge,” as it was called, instructed teenagers to create an electrical current with a loosely plugged in wall charger, then dared them to touch a coin to the exposed prongs. The results of this challenge can cause anything from sparks and a ruined electrical outlet to an electric shock or a large fire.

The mother, Kristin Livdahl, documented the dangerous suggestion and shared it in a post on Twitter.

In another tweet, Livdahl recalled that when the suggestion was made, “I was right there and yelled, No, Alexa, no! like it was a dog.”

Thankfully, her daughter wasn’t planning on participating in the challenge, telling her mother that “she is too smart to do something like that anyway.”

Unfortunately, other parents weren’t so lucky. Teenagers participating in the challenge have managed to start fires, and cut power to parts of their houses.

After Livdahl’s tweet thread received a lot of attention, Amazon reached out to her.

Later, the company released a statement to BBC news saying that it had taken “swift action” to resolve the issue.

“Customer trust is at the center of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers. As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it,” the statement read.

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