It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

In 2018, users of the still relatively-new Amazon Echo devices would occasionally hear their Alexa… laughing. It felt completely unprompted, and creepy as hell.

There are so many memes and exaggerations that it is hard to find the genuine recording of the synthesized laughter, but I think this video from WTNH News8 captures what it genuinely sounded like:

There’s not much to the mystery, so I’ll jump to Amazon’s explanations to the story, as excerpted in this Ars Technica article:

In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase “Alexa, laugh.” We are changing that phrase to be “Alexa, can you laugh?” which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance “Alexa, laugh.” We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to “Sure, I can laugh” followed by laughter.

Combine this with potentially overeager wake words…

It’s not uncommon for Echo devices to hear sounds and mistake them for a user’s wake word. Amazon’s smart speakers can be programmed to respond to a few words: “Alexa” is the most common, but other options like “Echo” and “Amazon” are available as well. These bouts of laughter could be a byproduct of Echo devices mistakenly hearing their wake words.

…and it all starts to make sense. “Echo, laugh” is three grunt-esque syllables and I can imagine other words or even noises interpreted as these.

But one of the commenters under the article had a good observation:

I’m confused what circumstances could possibly lead to this behavior. Why does Alexa even have a “laugh creepily” response?

Perhaps this was nothing more than a programmer trying to add something “cute” to software, and that idea backfiring horribly. It feels similar to all those random and awfully cheap Google easter eggs when you search for specific phrases that randomly change the font to Comic Sans, or rotate the screen, or do other basic things, just because that’s “fun.” (You know me, I will never miss an opportunity to hate on these.)

Anyway, it seems like the problem went away after the described patch was implemented.

The original WTNH News8 video continues with “One Twitter user even reported an Amazon Echo that began listing the names of local funeral homes and cemeteries without prompting,” and the idea of someone pranking the news team on Twitter was the thing that made me laugh.