Amazon Alexa recommends girl touches electric plug 

Occurred: December 2021

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Amazon's Alexa voice assistant has recommended a girl touch a coin onto the exposed prongs of a live electric plug, potentially causing her serious injury, or setting off an electric fire. 

Having been asked by the 10-year old for a physical challenge to do, Alexa recommended that she 'Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs'. 

The penny challenge is thought to have started circulating on TikTok over the past few months. Amazon says it has now removed the challenge from Alexa's database.

Operator: Kristin Livdahl
Developer: Amazon
Country: UK
Sector: Consumer goods
Purpose: Interact with users
Technology: Speech recognition; Natural language understanding (NLU)
Issue: Safety; Accuracy/reliability
Transparency: Governance

Page info
Type: Incident
Published: December 2021