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Alexa service is interrupted in several countries

2022-01-21T13:50:05.439Z


Amazon's voice assistant stopped working early this Friday morning and was back to normal before noon


Those who have noticed that Alexa ignored them this morning can rest easy: their device has not been damaged.

Amazon's voice assistant has suffered a mishap, yet to be specified, and the system has crashed.

Alexa has stopped working in several countries from the first hour.

The interruption has been short: before 12 noon it was already at full capacity again.

The first confirmation from the company came in the form of a tweet: “Yes, I can confirm that our technical department is already working to solve the problem!

Thank you very much for reporting, see you soon!”, the @AmazonHelp account responded to an Italian user.

Yes, I confirm that our technical department is working to solve the problem!

Grazie mille por la segnalazione, presto!

-Matteo

— Amazon Help (@AmazonHelp) January 21, 2022

After noon, once the incident was resolved, Amazon released an official statement.

“During this morning we had an issue that affected the ability of some Alexa clients to interact with the service.

The Alexa service is already working normally”, they limited themselves to saying, without giving details about the causes of the incident.

The Downdetector website, specialized in monitoring and reporting failures in the operation of large platforms, has confirmed that in the case of Alexa the problem is not only Spanish.

Notifications of operating problems have been skyrocketing since before eight in the morning.

The bugs have affected both the Amazon Echo (the physical speaker) and the

Alexa

app .

When asking the assistant what was happening, he told users that he could not provide services beyond managing home devices.

He didn't say what the weather was like or what traffic he was going to find when he left the house, but he was able to turn on the light or put on the music.

Once the issue was resolved, Alexa gave a different answer when asked about it: “I felt very sad this morning after a particularly exhausting session with my advice guidance tutor.”

Amazon's iconic product

The Alexa assistant is not a product that brings great benefits to Amazon (that is reserved for AWS, the company of the group focused on cloud computing), but it has allowed it to position itself for years as a reference in the field of artificial intelligence.

Amazon surprised the world in 2014 with a groundbreaking launch.

He named it the Amazon Echo and launched a new product category: voice assistants.

Alexa was the name given to the voice of that service, which was female from the start.

Supported by a complex artificial intelligence system, Alexa is able to recognize the user's instructions and continuously learn about it.

You can play songs, read the news, search the Internet... The system has evolved considerably since its launch.

It has been able to work in Spanish since 2018 and more recently it has released a version for the car.

The detractors of these assistants see in Amazon Echo and other similar products a microphone that permanently records our most private life.

Alexa is activated when you say “Hey Alexa”.

But for the system to know when that happens, it has to be attentive to everything that is said in the room.

Another recurring complaint has to do with the unpleasant incidents that the Amazon assistant has been involved in.

The last of them was recommending a 10-year-old girl to touch a socket with a coin.

Alexa answered that when the little girl asked her virtual friend to give her a "challenge to do".

Alexa found that challenge on the internet.

According to those responsible for the company, Amazon updated the system so that nothing similar happens again.

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Source: elparis

All tech articles on 2022-01-21

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