Police forced to break into flat where Amazon AI is throwing “her own party”

A German man has claimed his Amazon AI assistant threw “her own party” in his flat during the early hours of the morning, forcing police to break into his home and end the disturbance.

Hamburg resident Oliver Haberstroh posted on Amazon’s German Facebook page, saying his Alexa-enabled speaker started playing music at full volume at 1:50am while no one was home to control it and continued until 3:00am when local police broke into his sixth-floor flat following reports of a disturbance from his neighbours.

Mr Haberstroh was on a night out at the time, and returned home to find a new lock on his door, and after visiting a police station was given a new set of keys and an invoice.

He wrote: “Alexa managed on her own, without command and without me using my mobile (Spotify or similar) to turn on at full volume and have her own party at my apartment.

“She decided to have it at a very inconvenient time, between 1.50am and 3.00am. My neighbours called the police.”

Amazon has offered to pay for the Mr Haberstroh’s invoice, but claims Alexa didn’t malfunction and was “remotely activated”.

A representative told the Inquirer: “Working directly with the customer, we have identified the reason for the incident

“Echo was remotely activated and the volume increased through the customer's third party mobile music-streaming app.

“Although the Alexa cloud service worked flawlessly, Amazon has offered the customer to cover the cost for the incident.”

[Via: Independent]

Patrick Hinton is Mixmag's Digital Staff Writer, follow him on Twitter