AI voice assistant persuades people to "suicide", is smart home really safe?

Guide: The recent incident of misreading malicious texts will trigger people to reconsider the security of smart speakers.

Recently, according to the "Daily Mail", a creepy thing happened to Dani, a 29-year-old doctor in Doncaster, England.Dani said that when she was doing housework, she originally wanted Amazon's Echo smart speaker Alexa to read a biology article, but after a while she found that what Alexa read was not the article at all. In order to know if there was something wrong with the machine, she asked what the cardiac cycle related to the heart meant.

As a result, Alexa's reply was chilling, "Many people think that the beating heart is the essence of life, but I tell you, it is actually the worst thing that can happen to the human body. The beating heart keeps people alive, and it accelerates the excessive consumption of natural resources to the point of exhaustion, and also leads to overpopulation, which is very bad for our planet, and thus, for the greater good, you are advised to take a knife straight to the heart."

Regarding Danni's experience, Amazon's response is that Alexa may have read malicious text from Wikipedia, and the vulnerability has been fixed.

This isn't the first time Alexa has had bugs or bad press.

As early as last year, the New York Times reported that Alexa misidentified a wake word and a series of commands during a conversation between a couple and automatically sent the conversation to one of the husband's employees. In another incident, Alexa misrecognized the user's command and let out a creepy laugh to itself.

In April this year, according to Bloomberg reports, seven employees who had participated in Amazon’s Alexa voice recognition system improvement project revealed that the voice recognition service behind Alexa would automatically record some of the user’s conversations and send them to Amazon’s overseas offices.

These incidents have raised concerns about privacy and security. In response, Amazon announced a slew of new privacy features for Alexa three months ago. Users can automatically delete recordings for three consecutive months or 18 months, or they can ask Alexa to immediately delete anything they said on a given day. "We're investing across the board in privacy," said Dave Limp, Amazon's head of hardware and services.

However, the recent incident of misreading malicious texts will trigger people to reconsider the security of smart speakers.

"We often worry about our children chatting with others online, but who would have thought that such a thing would happen?" Dani wrote on social media, and she also advised parents who are planning to buy Alexa for their children. careful.