Amazon Alexa holds 2am party when owner is out

Police in Hamburg, Germany, had to break into a German man's house after his Alexa device decided to hold a party on its own while he was out with friends. According to Oliver Haberstroh, his Amazon personal assistant suddenly started playing music at full volume at 1.50am without having received any instructions and without him having used his mobile phone. Angry neighbours alerted the police, who broke into Haberstroh's apartment and silenced Alexa, pulling out the plug. Amazon stated that the incident occurred because the Echo was remotely activated, and the volume was increased through the customer's third-party mobile music-streaming app. An Amazon spokesperson said, "We have identified the reason for the incident. Echo was remotely activated and the volume increased through the customer's third party mobile music-streaming app. Although the Alexa cloud service worked flawlessly, Amazon has offered to cover the cost for the incident." The event raised questions about the accuracy and reliability of AI assistants and the potential for devices to activate without user instruction, causing disturbance and having potential financial implications. System 🤖 Amazon Alexa Operator: Oliver Haberstroh Developer: Amazon Country: Germany Sector: Consumer goods Purpose: Provide information, services Technology: NLP/text analysis; Natural language understanding (NLU); Speech recognition Issue: Accuracy/reliability

Date it happened

2017-11-01

Organisation involved

Oliver Haberstroh

Product, system or model

Amazon Alexa

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