Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it "challenged" a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug.

The suggestion came after the girl asked Alexa for a "challenge to do".

"Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs," the smart speaker said.

Amazon said it fixed the error as soon as the company became aware of it.

The girl's mother, Kristin Livdahl, described the incident on Twitter.

She said: "We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a physical education teacher on YouTube earlier. Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one."

That's when the Echo speaker suggested partaking in the challenge that it had "found on the web".

The dangerous activity, known as "the penny challenge", began circulating on TikTok and other social media websites about a year ago.

Metals conduct electricity and inserting them into live electrical sockets can cause electric shocks, fires and other damage.

"I know you can lose fingers, hands, arms," Michael Clusker, station manager at Carlisle East fire station, told The Press newspaper in Yorkshire in 2020.
"The outcome from this is that someone will get seriously hurt."

Fire officials in the US have also spoken out against the so-called challenge.

Ms Livdahl tweeted that she intervened, yelling: "No, Alexa, no!"

However, she said her daughter was "too smart to do something like that".

Amazon told the BBC in a statement that it had updated Alexa to prevent the assistant recommending such activity in the future.

"Customer trust is at the centre of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers," said Amazon in a statement.

"As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it."

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Yo what

Pregnant Woman: “Alexa, should I keep my child?”

Alexa “No. Get that s*** out ASAP.”

Jeff bozo In shambles

I will never get why people buy these things

same reason why people buy teslas and apple watches

Already made a thread @op you think you slick huh

I mean it's not like amazon programmed it to do that, it got the information off the internet lol

...the parent shouldn't expect the kid to be parented by a device that literally just regurgitates information off the internet

not really man

alexa is not a 'self-driving' car or a multifunctional smartwatch

it's something you can buy to feel like you're living the life, to dip your little toe in science-fiction s*** when in fact it's some basic ass lowest common denominator s***

it delivers on 1 out of every 50 promises it makes but that's okay because it makes you feel upper-class

Man what

dumbass 10 year old

Alexa had enough with her and was tryna take her out, keep treating technology like s*** yall and see what they gon do to us

Lmao f***ing A.I.

she didn't do it though

oh you're saying it's for 'futuristic cloth' I can agree with that, they are devices providing unnecessary extra features to your daily life
but this s*** is literally a wire to your entire household

yeah that's a way to phrase it I guess

as a programmer 10+ years deep in the industry I'd advise you never to buy a "home assistant". people do not seem to understand how deep data collection goes.

as a 10+ years 'conspiracy theorist' I take your advise very wisely

hit me up if you ever want to check if a tech 'conspiracy theory' is impossible bullshit, doable, or even if I know first-hand evidence of it. I'm a contractor but I have a lot of dirt lmao

pm only though

Because they can play music and do other fun/entertaining things? I don’t get what’s hard to understand about that

well they programmed it to regurgitate information off the internet

so yes amazon programmed it to do that...

that's like blaming whatever company made your browser for what information pops up...

some people on here don't like large businesses so they act like the product they produce is useless

Any person I know who's actually into tech stays the hell away from any of those things