Alexa Tells 10-Year-Old Girl to Touch Live Plug with Penny
upstart writes:
Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to touch live plug with penny:
Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it "challenged" a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug.
The suggestion came after the girl asked Alexa for a "challenge to do". "Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs," the smart speaker said.
She said: "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." That's when the Echo speaker suggested partaking in the challenge that it had "found on the web".
The dangerous activity, known as "the penny challenge", began circulating on TikTok and other social media websites about a year ago.
Metals conduct electricity and inserting them into live electrical sockets can cause electric shocks, fires and other damage.
"I know you can lose fingers, hands, arms," Michael Clusker, station manager at Carlisle East fire station, told The Press newspaper in Yorkshire in 2020. "The outcome from this is that someone will get seriously hurt."
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