Amazon Assistant Suggests Porn Instead Of A Nursery Rhyme For A Boy

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Alexa , Amazon's digital voice assistant  , made a rather curious (and alarming) mistake with a young child, to whom she suggested suggestions for porn content when the child asked for her favorite songs . And this is just one example of what can happen when a voice assistant does not recognize the words you just said well ...

Porn instead of nursery rhymes for a child

It seems that we must be very careful if we let the smallest of the house use a voice assistant, especially if it does not have any type of control or content filter, or some protection for minors. This has been demonstrated by this family with a video on YouTube in which the child appears struggling to make himself understood with  Alexa , Amazon's assistant  , on an Amazon Echo device  .

The child repeatedly asks the assistant to play one of his favorite songs, and at first  Alexa responds that she does not recognize his request. But after a while the final surprise arrives, and that is that Amazon's voice detects that the child has requested to listen to a porn channel and begins to play it , while the parents scream in alarm asking  Alexa to stop. Of course: between their cries of alarm they cannot help laughing out loud, without believing what is happening.

Amazon Echo, voice assistants, and parental controls

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Although most devices and applications have parental control systems to prevent children from accessing pornographic content or inappropriate for them for other reasons (for example, series or movies where extreme violence is shown). But in the case of the Amazon Echo speaker , which many parents use to make it easy to organize at home with young children, it seems that the assistant  Alexa has gone far beyond the expected limits.

From the Amazon company  , a spokesperson has confirmed that they are already working to develop much stricter parental and content controls to prevent situations like this from happening again in the future.

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As a curiosity, it is worth noting that there have already been parents who have expressed complaints and concerns about  Alexa before. In particular, many consider that the voice assistant has an infinite tolerance for insults or “bad manners” from users , which could be encouraging the development of rude and rude behavior among children. The minors find that they can speak however they want to the Amazon assistant  and still get what they want (the lights in the house are turned off or a song they want to hear is played).

In any case, all those details can be fixed with improvements in the voice assistant, and probably  Amazon will continue to constantly update the Alexa parameters  so that the user experience continues to improve and so that there are no unpleasant surprises when children use the devices of the company.