"Alexa" almost killed a British girl .. He asked her to put a coin in the electrical socket

Amazon has updated its Alexa smart voice assistant after it "asked" a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin with the forks of an electric charger half way into a power socket.

The suggestion came after the girl asked Alexa to give her a 'challenge to do'.

"Put the phone charger halfway into the wall socket, then touch the penny (the smallest British coin) with the exposed prongs of the charger," Alexa said.

Amazon said it "fixed the bug as soon as the company became aware of it."

Kristen Livdahl, the girl's mother, described the details of what happened on Twitter.

"We were doing some physical challenges, like lying on the floor, side rolling, and shoeing, which the physical education teacher had requested on YouTube earlier," she said.

The weather was bad outside.

And my daughter wanted another challenge.”

It was then that Alexa suggested participating in the challenge, which she "found on the web".

The dangerous challenge, known as the "penny challenge" or coin, began spreading on TikTok and other social media about one year ago, and many metals conduct electricity and inserting them into an electrical socket can cause electric shocks, fires and other damage.

Livdahl said in her tweet that she intervened, yelling "No, Alexa, no!" However, she said her daughter was "too smart to do something like this".

Amazon told the BBC in a statement that it had updated Alexa to prevent the voice assistant from suggesting such activity in the future.

"Customer trust is at the center of everything we do, and Alexa is designed to deliver accurate, relevant and useful information to customers," Amazon said in a statement.

"As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it," she said.

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