Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Last week, we shared with you some odd reports from Amazon Echo owners, who heard Alexa making some spooky breathing noises.
- The issue seemed to pop up most reliable when asking Alexa to count long sequences of numbers.
- Amazon now reports this is fixed, and occurred due to the behavior of Alexa’s text-to-speech engine.
Most of the time, voice assistants are pretty predictable. Ideally, that means responding quickly and correctly to our prompts, but even when they mess up, we tend to see the same sort of mistakes: misunderstanding a device name, for instance. Every once in a while, though, we learn about some behavior that just seems downright bizarre — and that’s just how we’d characterize an unnerving Amazon Alexa issue we shared last month, with Echo devices producing odd breathing-like noises in the middle of their output. Thankfully, Amazon has worked out what was going wrong here, and shares word of a fix.
The problem started out so simply: Alexa users would ask the service to begin counting numbers. And while Alexa responded as we’d expect at first, it didn’t take long for things to go off the rails. Interspersed with the count, you can hear Alexa delivering some unnerving, guttural sounds. Eventually, it tends to lose track, skipping or repeating numbers, jumping around, and just utterly failing at this basic request.
An Amazon spokesperson reached to Android Authority to shine a little light on what went so fantastically wrong here. According to the company, this all stems from the behavior of Alexa’s text-to-speech (TTS) engine. While it’s been able to handle normal-length responses just fine, longer outputs full of sequential content — like these lists of numbers — were apparently able to trip it up.
The good news is that Amazon developers were able to get to the bottom of why the TTS model was acting like this, and have already sorted out a solution. The company tells us that a fix is currently being deployed.
Unless you really liked having a spooky-sounding Echo on your desk, that’s pretty much unambiguously a win.
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