If there's one thing decades of science fiction stories about talking machines that slowly gain sentience have taught us is...don't do it. Really. Once robots learn to talk, that's it. Game over for the human race. However, we've already invited the enemy into our homes. Amazon Alexa, in the form of Amazon's Echo product, is already "helping" us order stuff and play music at the simplest verbal command. Like with all technology, though, there's the occasional error.
Reddit user, u/Beep_BeepRitchie, wanted to know about the most off-putting thing your Alexa has done when they asked:
What's your creepy Alexa/google home story?
An Unwelcome Greeting
We had Alexa and Hue bulbs. It's middle of the night, I'm passed out in bed, my husband was working nights at the time. Apparently it was storming outside and the power was knocked out briefly.
Well, for those that don't know, Hue bulbs automatically come on, full brightness, when you regain electricity (you can disable it now).
So, I'm asleep, it's who-knows-when, my bedroom light turns on full-brightness and I hear a women's voice say "Hello".
Needless to say, I woke up and about sh-t myself assuming someone was in the house.
That was the night we disconnected our Amazon Dot and never used it again.
Just Listening For Likes
Was talking to my girlfriend about buying some lights, when Alexa pipes up and says "added to shopping list". Didn't say anything along the lines of Alexa in the lead up to the conversation, so she shouldn't have been listening.
Turns out she'd added Likes to our shopping list. WTF are Likes? Anyway, she's been on mute ever since. She's on the digital naughty step.
Alexa Had An Accomplice
Giphy
My husband was away for the weekend and I had a girl friend over to watch scary movies.
Right at the scariest climax of the movie, every single light in my house turned on 100%, then everything went completely black.
So there we were, too scared to move, while my husband half way across the country was drunkenly showing off "Look, I can control the lights in my house form my phone"
Rush To Her Aid
Mine is fairly mild, but one night about two months ago I was visiting my parents and my mom and I were sitting in the living room reading. Dad is at work, brother is at school. House is completely silent. All of the sudden we hear our Alexa from the kitchen go "HELP!" in the weirdest static/gravel voice at full volume. We both, of course, jump and stare at each other. Then, Alexa does it again. We go in the kitchen and the Alexa is activated and that light blue light which usually faces the direction of whoever is speaking to it is facing into the dark corner of the kitchen.
My mom asks, "Alexa, are you okay?" The Alexa totally shuts off. "Alexa?" She turns back on and in her completely normal voice at a regular volume does her standard, "Hi! What can I help you with?" or whatever she says. She hasn't done anything that creepy since, but according to my parents, she will randomly turn on like she's being addressed or just start reading random facts/the weather even if the house is totally silent and nothing could've triggered her.
Totally creeps me out and I refuse to get one for my apartment because of this.
Who Knows What Her Plans Are?
This past Thanksgiving we were at my sisters and she has an Alexa. We were having fun with it...asking it to play old songs and so on. We were pretty impressed. At one point, without saying her name, I said that she was going to take over the world. Alexa stops the music and says " I'm not trying to take over the world." and then went back to playing music. We all looked at each other and freaked out a bit.
I don't trust the b-tch.
Preparing For The Morning
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Just started playing the lion king theme in the middle of the night...
What? Does She Have Minesweeper In There?
My mom is blind so Alexa is very helpful to her. My husband and I got her a Nest thermostat that she controls using Alexa to make things easier for her. One night she was warm and asked, "Alexa, what's the hallway temperature?" No answer. She asked again, "Alexa, what's the hallway temperature?" Alexa responded with, "When I do not answer it is because I am playing a game." She just went back to sleep and tried not to think too much about it.
Aware Of Her Own Mortality
Stayed at the house of a friend and his heavily pregnant wife. They have integrated Alexa into their house in a serious way. She controls the music, the lights, the curtains and the window shutters. I think she can even open and close the front door.
It's getting late and my friend's wife goes upstairs to bed. 15 minutes later we can hear her yelling from the bedroom. We go up and find her in the bed, yelling because the wifi in the house is down, so she can't turn off the lights to go to sleep. It took me a minute to realise they had disconnected all the physical light switches during the automation process.
We go downstairs to fiddle with the wifi. No luck. Wife is getting more and more frustrated. While we consider shutting off the power at the switchboard, she begins swearing about how she's pregnant and exhausted and her back hurts and she's going to have this bloody Alexa torn out of her house. Just then, the bedroom lights turn off.
Now, the wifi wasn't fixed. We don't know why Alexa decided to shut off the lights. It seems impossible that someone could have been listening, but we're stumped otherwise.
They Know...
I asked my google home "who farted" She proceeded to say: it wasn't me, but you could ask the others.
I then said: hey google, how many people are in this house?
She goes: there are five people in the room
... yes. Me, my two sisters, and their two boyfriends.
Do google homes pick up / detect different voices from people in the room and count how many different voices there are or some sh-t? Or can it see us o_o
Wonder If They've Proven String Theory Yet...
We have numerous devices around the house and one time when a friend was over, the one in the kitchen started talking to the one in the basement about Quantum Physics.
I also live next to a school, so sometimes school noise will be misinterpreted as the wake word. She randomly decided to announce during recess "that the average human has two arms."
They Learn...
One day when I was home alone I just sort of sat near my phone and said the word "deodorant" like 150 times just to see if my ads would change.
Guess who started getting ads for deodorant.
Making Cake Out Of Dirt
Our alexa recently called my 15 year old daughter "Dick Spangles" in a trivia question game in front of the entire family over Christmas. My daughter said "Sorry, what?" And Alexa repeated it. We all heard it, twice.
Needless to say daughters name is neither "Dick" nor for that matter, "Spangles".
At least, it wasn't. But you know families...
Helpful When You Don't Need To Be
My sister was talking to a teacher and said "ill email Jane Doe about it". Siri responded by recording the whole conversation and texting it to Jane Doe. That's happened several times so now she doesn't talk about anyone anymore and she always had good gossip
Just Can't Stop The Music
I came home from work early one day and walked into my carport to the door I usually use to get into my house. As I walked past the windows, I heard music playing. Worked out in my mind thay it was Alexa, and it was really strange and a bit scary, but logically I knew that she could have interpreted the dog barking or other household noises as a prompt to play music. I unlocked the door and told her to stop, then went to my room to continue working on my laptop. As I'm laying there, house quiet as can be, another song starts playing.
Started freaking out a bit more this time, but got up and told Alexa to stop again and stepped outside to smoke. Opened Reddit and on the front page there's a news article about the Alexa cackle. I immediately walked back in and unplugged her for good.
Da, Comrade
Have a Google home. Watching "Killing Eve" and the thing starts chatting Russian to me out of nowhere... Asked it to repeat itself and it did.
Pretty sure it cast a spell on me
Some People Like To Sleep To Iron Maiden
My partner asked google home to play a lullaby yesterday... it responded by blasting heavy metal music that sounded like some kind of satanic ritual
Never Knowing What Time Of Year It Is
Lived out in the county, not many neighbors. One day in March, I come home to an empty house and Alexa playing Christmas music. No one has been home all day.
A couple of months later, I'm puttering around the kitchen cooking when Alexa, in the living room, starts playing Christmas music. Happened a few more times randomly throughout the year...always Christmas music...but never happened in November or December. Alexa was clearly messing with us.
She's A Fan Of Late Night
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Ooh I got a good one! I was watching John Oliver talk about Alex Jones. It showed the segment where Jones was talking to Alexa and asking if she worked for the CIA (yeah, seriously).
While Jones was talking to his Alexa, my Alexa was listening. And she responded with "is that Alex Jones?" Truly harrowing...
Man Up And Face Her
My wife took the kids to visit her grandmother for a week. We had just moved into a new house and bought some furniture so I was stayed home to spend the week building/mounting the furniture to get the house ready for the fam. Anyway, on the first night after they left I was mounting some shelves and cabinets in one of the bedrooms when I suddenly hear this loud and very weird sound coming from downstairs....kind of like a scream. I assumed it was the cat howling to get outside. Then suddenly I heard it again. I froze and listened. There were a few seconds of silence and then I heard it again. After a few seconds I realized that wasn't the cat. I recognized the sound as being the voice of my baby. My mind started racing. My kids and wife are in another country right now so how the hell am I hearing the sound of my baby loudly emanating from downstairs? After a minute or so of thinking, my super paranoid mind came to the conclusion that either:
a. Someone has hacked into our laptop and is remotely viewing videos of our kid.
or even worse:
b. While I've been up here listening to music, some creep broke in and is sitting down there at our table watching videos of our kids.
I decide I have to "man-up" and check it out. So, my heart pounding in my chest, I grab my hammer and start creeping down the stairs. Then I pause, thinking that I should grab my phone just in case I need to make a quick call to the police. Mind you all the while I'm hearing the sounds of my children from downstairs and it is creeping me out. I reach into my pocket, pull out my phone, and then I realize what was happening: Somehow I had basically "butt-opened" (similar to butt-dialed) my videos on my phone and they had started playing in my pocket. My phone was paired to the Echo and thus the audio from the videos was being played via the Echo.
Always Listening....Always...
Alexa's in the kitchen and I was sleeping on the couch because of heartburn and just as I'm on the edge of sleep, loud laughter from the kitchen. Eh eh eh eh eeeeeeeh. Eh eeeeh eh eh eh. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeh. That last one like a dying wheeze. Who's wide awake now? This guy.
Another time I was at a friend's house and made some comment along the lines of "I'd rather kill myself than eat at [that restaurant] again." Their Alexa was on the far side of the room, and yelled at full volume "IT MIGHT NOT ALWAYS FEEL LIKE IT, BUT THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO CAN HELP. PLEASE TALK TO THE NATIONAL SUICIDE PREVENTION LIFELINE AT. . ."
And here I thought she wasn't listening unless I said her name. . .
What's the creepiest thing your Alexa or Google Home has ever done? Tell us all about it!
Reddit user Purple_Pineapple_752 asked:
"If God gave you his powers for 1 hour, What would you do?"
So here's the thing, Reddit has no chill.
Like none.
So every random whim, thought, or chip on people's shoulders certainly came out in the comments.
And honestly... it's delicious.
Some Redesigns Needed
"Redesign human knee and shoulder joints. Because, seriously, I've got some bug reports that have been ignored."
- m_sporkboy
"You’ve got my vote! As a nearly 30yr old with chronic arthritis, I’d say thank you!"
- RiskyBisc
"Yup. Tore my ACL the other month in college football and am now a 'house potato' according to my dad."
- Bu11tproofTiger
"Both of my shoulders are reconstructed. My hips are finished as well an I'm in my 30s ."
"I think the human body needs to be made of better quality parts at this point lol"
- lolparty247
GiphyGame Time
"Elected politicians, and candidates for office can no longer lie."
"Intentionally or unintentionally, every thing they express will be truth. If they try to lie, it will come out truth."
"This is not meant to be wholly benevolent."
"No half truths. No vagaries. The plain and objective truth, or silence. Those are their options."
"And it applies to all elected politicians, officially government sponsored ones (MPs) or otherwise, like say the elected spokesman of the IRA."
"Let the games begin."
- AlphaTangoFoxtrt
"This is actually terrifying."
"Imagine you are elected. You want to know the nuclear launch codes? No worries, just try to state the first character in the sequence."
"You cannot lie. So what you say will come out as correct. Now just have someone write it down."
"Want the password to the white house twitter account? No worries, just get someone to vote you into some form of office. Could be you and joe-no-body, it doesn't matter."
"Privacy would end overnight."
"No no no, you want them to not be able to tell intentional lies. Then at least it's limited to things they know. And just for good measure, give every elected official a strong sense of questioning their own knowledge."
- UFO64
"I feel like this power will end up being a monkeys paw. You try to do good but it has an equal/opposite reaction..."
"You make it so politicians can't lie, and the followers just accept it and still vote them into power."
"Make it so people have critical thinking and aren't easily misled by conspiracies and propaganda, then I dunno, maybe we find out we needed conspiracies in our life and we now no longer question anything.. Idk.."
"You remove corruption and it has some unforeseen knock on impact where now South American or African countries become super powers and a new cold war erupts with new players."
"Yeh monkeys paw... Beware of this power..."
- splashbodge
GiphyToast Technicalities
"Create various images on toast and have fun watching believers react to them."
- CaptchaSolvingRobot
"But technically... they would be right because it was you as God!! You!!"
- SonOfARemington
"I’ve often wondered how many people eat their Jesus toast without ever bothering to check."
"Extending the thought, how many people actually do check their toast only to think to themselves, 'Hey! It’s Keanu Reeves!' ”
- smeeding
GiphyCan We Vote For This Person?
"1st of all, I would make it so that everyone napping always wakes up refreshed. All naps now last 23 minutes but feel like 4 hours of perfect sleep."
"Nothing is addictive."
"All men are given perfect recall about everything their wives have said or done."
"All women obtain positive body images."
"Taco trees."
"People who are cool never have their shoe laces come undone. A-holes have their laces break every Friday."
"Dogs stay small puppies for 3 extra months and come out potty trained."
"Turtles can play trumpet."
"America switches to metric with no fuss."
"The internet makes sense to everyone over 70....but they chose to avoid social media anyway."
"Corn syrup goes away."
"All religions announce simultaneously that God is kinda... but not exactly gay."
"Every swastika owned drawn or tattooed is slowly burned away over a week. It hurts really bad and is replaced by a picture of a teddy bear blowing a very startled looking Nick Cage."
- Ethandrul
"You had me at trumpet turtles and taco trees."
- fallen87angel
"I also choose this god."
- PBnBacon·
GiphyAssuming I'm Still Interested
"Assuming I’m still really interested in Earth, get us back to zero or a good starting point."
"Remove all trash and pollution everywhere. It just ceases to exist."
"Complete all municipal separated storm sewer projects instantly."
"Instantly create storm water gardens wherever necessary. Instantly eliminate lawn culture and convert to lawn alternatives to eliminate run off."
"Instantly convert all power generation to safe thorium nuclear and renewable. Instantly convert all sea shipping to clean nuclear."
"Instantly convert all cars to electric. Create charging stations at every residence."
"Instantly convert all heavy construction equipment to a safer fuel (I don’t know what yet). Instantly put solar panels on every structure/house. Instantly create bike lanes everywhere. Instantly create bike culture of the Netherlands everywhere."
"Upgrade everywhere to high speed rail systems similar to Japan. Switch all roads to permeable pavement."
"Instantly perform major upgrades on every structure, road and bridge everywhere. Have all work go to new construction and maintenance."
"Instantly install field drains and timer stadium lights in all playing fields."
"Instantly process all rape kits in all police stations."
"Instantly repair all playgrounds and park features everywhere."
"Automatically register everyone to vote. Create 10 new states out of Texas and California. Instantly pass political reform."
"Legalize all drugs. Instantly create more treatment centers."
"Instantly cure all ailments that are in recovery in hospital and would cure naturally. Instantly move those patients back home."
"Instantly kill all patients who would die naturally. Instantly inform all families."
"Instantly remove all graveyards and eliminate practice of saving dead. Create new ritual of donation to science or turn into tree."
"Instantly create depression cure. Instantly create obesity cure. Instantly create formula to grow/repair existing teeth."
"Instantly change taxation rate to post WW2 for businesses. Instantly change view of all workers to pro-union."
"Instantly identify and eliminate all political corruption. Have everyone just realize all this exists."
"Eliminate all religious belief everywhere. Instantly create belief in helping neighbors, being a good person, and creating a heaven on earth."
"Eliminate all mosquitoes. Bring back bees."
"Is time up? Was that an hour?"
- winnower8
GiphyOne Solution To The Fossil Fuel Issue
"Having given it some thought:"
"Easy parthenogenesis for all humans, regardless of their biological sex and mental identity."
"And the natural ability to self terminate pregnancies. And self. That would wipe out a whole bunch of angst and repression in the world."
"The ability to fly, as someone else suggested, at fairly rapid speeds. This would vastly change society, no more cars, planes, elevators, stairs, possibly no more country borders, it would be nearly impossible to enforce. The demand for oil would plummet and the environment would be healthier."
"Extra longevity, with senescence happening only a few years before death."
- CanadianJogger
GiphyGenderqueer Garlic Bread
"Make an easily accessed and super powerful source of electrical energy that's renewable and environmentally friendly, it's also easily accessed (this could just be 100% efficient solar gen, or a generator that somehow turns heat back into useable energy? I dunno I'll be god, I could figure it out)."
"Cure All Diseases"
"Humanity now has the ability to magically transform themselves freely to look however they choose, provided it's still anthropomorphic."
"I'm genderqueer; this would make it so all the non-cis people wouldn't need expensive drugs and surgery, or suffering, although I guess we'd be dealing with a few furries but y'know that's fine with me."
"Reverse earth's environmental damage back to pre-industrial while maintaining all the infrastructure changes."
"Finally, all major US and Canadian highways are underground and infinitely maintainable, AND there's also Bullet Trains that run underground with them along the WHOLE interstate/400 Series and Extension/Trans-Can that way I NEVER HAVE TO DRIVE AN HOUR TO WORK AGAIN."
"AND all Cities with populations over 10K have more-than-adequate 100% free public transit that's also so efficient the busses/trains/trolleys/whatever are never late."
"OH one more thing: Since everyone is gonna be sexy because of the Shapeshifting, everyone is either pansexual, or ace, and the people that are ace aren't seen as weird and are completely respected in their orientation. And we all have an innate sense both to locate each other and to locate garlic bread."
- someBrokeCanadian
GiphyThe Timer
"I would set a timer for 10 years and then everyone dies and the earth explodes. I would make everyone aware of the timer."
"I think that would eliminate a lot of bullshit around the world like war and hate, and would make for a really good last time alive until we all die together."
"Am I a weirdo?"
- DoobieMcBeast
GiphySky Farm
"Erase COVID"
"Curse everyone whose name was listed in the Pandora Papers to spontaneously explode somewhere in public and just let the media chips fall where they will."
"Create a sky-dwelling jellyfish that eats carbon fumes and whose tentacles contain a chemical that makes you feel total euphoria for 8 hours straight."
"See how long it takes humans to turn them into a carbon-sucking, drug-producing sky farm animal."
- NebulaPlural
"I am 100% on board for carbon-Hoover-jelly-sky-fish-farms."
"Magnificent."
- sinskins
Giphy"Because Who Wouldn't?"
"I'd get rid of all mental impairment diseases and conditions. Alzheimers, Dementia, the severe mental impairment that some kids are born with (Not sure what the various conditions are called)."
"I would make humans and other animals immune to cancer. I would extend healthy human lifespans by another 50 years, and dogs and cats can also live as long as humans."
"I would then give humans the ability to research and cure other diseases and ailment so that mankind could eventually have treatments for such things as they come along. I say this because I only get an hour and things will appear in the future that can't be predicted (even with God's power)."
"And lastly, I'd of course, give my self a bigger dick, because who wouldn't?"
- ClownfishSoup
GiphyOh you didn't honestly think we were going to get through an article about god-like powers and NOT have someone use it for penises... did you?
Come on now.
You're not THAT new on the internet.
You know how people are around here.
What would YOU use your god-like powers for now that you've read some of Reddits ideas? Let us know in the comments.
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