You wouldn’t have thought this was possible – however Ludvig managed to upset Google Home (our version of Alexa). We have one near him which is his chat buddy. He asks it what the weather is like, to turn on a sort of jungle sound, to set an alarm (which confuses google – and long may that stay the same as we don’t want alarms going off at random times). But sometimes he just calls ‘hey google’ and doesn’t know what to say.
Google then prompts him with ‘how can i help you today’, and sometimes he’ll say something relevant, but other times he’ll start barking, meowing or doing door impressions.
On Saturday the latter happened and Google must have been in a really bad mood – as it said ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand you’ – and then said GOOD. NIGHT. in a really grumpy voice and switched itself off. Neither Ian or I had heard anything like it before! I wouldn’t have thought it was possible. I wonder why they have programmed it to have a grumpy voice and in what situation they normally use it.
If I was more clever, I would invent an Alexa for parrots. One that they can chat to, get it to play songs – but there’s no danger of the parrot ordering shopping, changing locks or setting midnight alarms. Ludvig has already managed to reprogram our device so he is now me and I, apparently, am called ‘No’ – which gets terribly confusing! And more than once Google has asked Ludvig if he wants to buy the song he’s listening to!