Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to touch live plug with a penny for a ‘challenge’

Washington: Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it suggested "penny challenge" to a 10-year-old girl asking her to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug.

BBC quoted the girl's mother, Kristin Livdahl, as saying on Monday: "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."

It was then that the Echo smart speaker suggested the "penny challenge" that it had "found on the web".

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

She added that her daughter was "too smart to do something like that".

The "penny challenge" became popular on social media about a year ago.

Following this incident, Amazon has updated Alexa to prevent the smart speaker from recommending any such challenges in the future.

Amazon told the BBC in a statement: "Customer trust is at the centre of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers. As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it." (UNI)