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.

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

There aren’t very many YouTube videos that talk about user interfaces of specific programs. I shared one long ago covering the Apple Music app, and this review by Tantacrul (a.k.a. Martin Keary) of music notation software Finale is so much better and more fun, and I wish there were more like it:

It’s not just a cutting critique of the user interface of a badly-aged app. It’s also a great introduction to the whole space, and a thought-provoking case study that goes beyond just UI, but also into business context and market changes. (Finale was released in 1988 and discontinued in 2024.)

While I would love to see productions like this for other niches (Blender! CAD! screenwriting software! design tools…?), this video already feels like a must watch to anyone working on complex software – even if it’s far away from music. It is a cautionary tale, and it covers the issues of an aging codebase, complexity, evolving system conventions, user habits, deferred maintenance, plugin ecosystems, innovator’s dilemma, and so on. It will make you think.

From the beginning of the video:

I want to look at how Finale got started, what was happening behind the scenes and how it got swept away due to larger external forces that its creators could not have predicted. And ultimately, how, when the writing was on the wall – when it was clear that big improvements were needed – it found itself stuck, unable to change. This is a case study in how creative software dies.

The video itself is also more creative than you might expect. As a matter of fact, toward the end, it can get a little… unhinged. You’ll know when that happens.

And that seems like a perfect transition into Halloween Week on Unsung! Let’s spend an entire week talking about scary and weird stories. It’s going to be fun!