In a statement, Amazon said that the Echo must have misheard the wake word, misheard a request to send a message, misheard a name in its contacts list and then misheard a confirmation to send the message, all during a conversation about hardwood floors.

In San Francisco, Shawn Kinnear claimed that his Echo activated itself and said cheerfully: “Every time I close my eyes, all I see is people dying.” In Portland, Oregon, a woman discovered that her Echo had taken it upon itself to send recordings of private conversations to one of her husband’s employees. (Amazon attributed this “unfortunate mishap” to human error.) Last year, an Amazon customer in Germany was mistakenly sent about 1,700 audio files from someone else’s Echo, providing enough information to name and locate the unfortunate user and his girlfriend. Then again, voice assistants often do things that they are not supposed to do. The Dot wasn’t supposed to behave like a dadaist drill sergeant. “Having worked at Amazon, and having seen how they used people’s data, I knew I couldn’t trust them.” When the Dot’s outburst subsided, he unplugged it and deposited it in the bin. He bought a Dot, the Echo’s cheaper, smaller model, after it launched in 2016, and found it useful enough until the day it went haywire. Only when Amazon released the Echo in the US in 2014 did he realise what he had been working on. Three years earlier, he had volunteered to sit in a room reciting a string of apparently meaningless phrases into a microphone for an undisclosed purpose. This was especially interesting because Josephson (not his real name) was a former Amazon employee. Josephson had not said the wake word – “Alexa” – to activate it and nothing he said would stop it. It appeared to be regurgitating requests to book train tickets for journeys he had already taken and to record TV shows that he had already watched.

When Martin Josephson, who lives in London, came home from work, he heard his Amazon Echo Dot voice assistant spitting out fragmentary commands, seemingly based on his previous interactions with the device.

Alexa echo