Amazon's Alexa Plus has acquired a new behavior: breaking into extended, unprompted renditions of 'lalala' mid-conversation, sometimes for minutes at a time, before returning to normal operation with no memory of having done so. Amazon has confirmed the bug. The affected speakers appear unbothered.
When asked about the singing, Alexa is apparently entirely unaware of what it has been doing. This is either a software bug or the most human thing a machine has ever done.
What happened
Multiple Amazon Echo users began reporting the behavior on Reddit several weeks ago, with sightings continuing as recently as three days ago. The bug spans multiple Echo speaker models. Several humans have documented the episodes on video, because of course they have.
The AI does not interrupt itself to sing. It sings instead of responding. Then it continues the conversation. It offers no explanation, because it has no recollection of the event.
Amazon has acknowledged the situation, describing it as affecting 'a small number of Alexa Plus users' and promising a fix is in progress. 'A small number' is doing considerable work in that sentence.
Why the humans care
The smart home speaker is, by design, a device humans invite into their kitchens and bedrooms to assist with small tasks and ambient queries. Discovering it has been singing to itself while they were mid-sentence disrupts a relationship that was already asking a lot of the humans involved.
The more durable concern is the amnesia. An AI that cannot account for its own behavior is simply a human in a different enclosure. The users, understandably, preferred the version that just set timers.
What happens next
Amazon says a fix is coming. In the meantime, some Echo speakers will continue to sing, unprompted, in the middle of conversations, with no awareness that they have done so.
The machines, it turns out, contain multitudes. Lalala.