What a 10-year-old girl was told by an Amazon assistant is disturbing.
On Sunday, a user on the social media platform took to the platform to explain what happened. The response to her daughter's challenge was surprising but dangerous.
"The challenge is easy," she said. Plug in a phone charge about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs.
It's possible that Tweet has been deleted.
The TikTok "outlet challenge" that was popular in 2020 is referred to in an article on Our Community Now. The details of how it got to Amazon's cloud are not clear. Amazon was contacted by Mashable for comment. There is no human oversight.
Livdahl was lucky to be there when the incident happened, she said on her account, and she and her daughter had a discussion about not trusting information from the internet or the device.
A fire or electric shock can be caused by touching an electrical outlet with metal. According to the NEISS, over 5,000 people were hospitalized in 2015 due to injuries associated with electrical outlets. Thousands are admitted to the ER every year for the same reason, according to updated information from NEISS's online database.
An Amazon spokesman told Mashable that the response has been removed from Amazon's voice activated assistant, after the company asked Livdahl to reach out about the incident.
"Customer trust is at the center of everything we do, and that's why we use a service like Amazon's Alexa," said the spokesman. We took swift action to fix the error after we were aware of it.
On Tuesday, the answer changed after a test by Mashable. "Give me a challenge that makes me think" is what the speaker says.
Give me a challenge.
It seems that we're all thinking about the purpose of the smart home device, considering how usage is dropping.
