‘Virtual assistants such as Alexa advise dangerous actions’

Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa can make users perform dangerous actions, an incident recently revealed. According to The Verge, a challenge request made a child want to perform a potentially dangerous action.

Specifically, when asked about a challenge, the virtual voice assistant Alexa would have advised a child to hold a coin against the exposed contacts of a telephone charger half plugged into a wall outlet. Of course, this could have resulted in a shock and short circuit. Finally knew an observant oldr to prevent this and to make it known via Twitter, according to the tech site.

It’s not just Amazon’s Alexa that seems to be struggling with this kind of problem. Research also shows that Google Assistant has recently provided potentially dangerous advice.

Misinterpreted information for algorithm

Apparently, the algorithm behind Alexa combined various information from the internet into this answer. It is not clear exactly how this happened. Amazon has taken immediate action to ensure that this erroneous and potentially harmful information is no longer made available by Alexa.

TikTok Information

Much of the information retrieved by the virtual assistants seems to come from the social media platform TiKTok. In both cases, this information was based on posts on this social media platform.