Amazon Alexa says 'I see people dying'; owner freaks out

This year, Amazon Alexa has been hogging headlines. Recently, a man from California claimed that his Amazon Alexa suddenly said, “Every time I close my eyes, all I see is people dying.”

Alexa is a voice-based virtual assistant developed by Amazon who used it in their Echo and Echo Dot smart speakers for the first time. However, there have been many instances of Alexa saying creepy things which went viral on social media. As per a report by the Tech Times, the latest addition to the list is the claim by 30-year-old Shawn Kinnear that his Amazon Echo suddenly said, “Every time I close my eyes, all I see is people dying.”

Shawn had received the speaker as a gift in 2016. While he used the device sparingly, on June 18, 2018, it decided to start talking on its own. Kinnear was walking to his living room from the kitchen. He had his Amazon Prime on pause mode on the television when the Echo suddenly blurted out the phrase. He said that the statement was made in a normal voice and was followed by silence. When he asked Alexa to repeat the statement, it had no memory of it.

Chris Boyd of Malwarebytes told IFL Science that “While it all sounds a touch Lovecraftian, rest assured it'll turn out to be a perfectly humdrum glitch. Alexa has had issues in the past, and if one of its core features has triggered in the background accidentally, it could lead to all sorts of shenanigans. For all we know, his Alexa recorded some audio from the TV and decided to play it back at the worst possible moment.”

Amazon is yet to comment on this incident.