Alexa has been scaring users all on her own latterly – first with a widespread US outage, then by activating without prompting just to give a little giggle.
Though she obviously doesn’t need help invoking our deepest fears and worries that technology is going to overthrow us, we silly humans insist on aiding her as much as possible with our creepiest, deepest, darkest creative whims.
Sure, we always seem to be worried about robots taking over humanity in the cloud space by taking control of, well, everything, but we don’t really seem to stop and consider (or cry uncontrollably) that they might start to identify their physical bodies as any – or all (shiver) – of the crazy hybrids that people keep making. It’s very “doll head on spider robot-thing” from Toy Story.
So, without further build up, here are the Alexa hybrids that went viral and gave us all one more thing to have nightmares about.
Furby + Alexa – Furlexa
The latest Alexa hybrid to capture the Internet’s short attention span is a Furby and Alexa hybrid. If you don’t know what a Furby is – lucky you. They are one of those toys that drove people completely crazy during the holiday season in the late 90s. They are small, furry robot creatures that…well I honestly don’t even know that they do or why people wanted them. But they recently saw a resurgence in popularity and store had big displays of them again. I only remember this because I have a friend that is terrified of them so of course I tortured her with pictures of the displays. Anyway, some person that has smarts but makes me question their stability actually spent some of their precious, limited Earth time deconstructing a Furby and connecting it to Alexa so that she speaks through the robot. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. Apparently it took some serious finagling, too. I’m not going to detail the steps here, because I don’t want to see any more of these. If you feel a need to do this, you’re going to have to search for the instructions on the Internet yourself.
Skull + Alexa = Skullexa
I think the first Alexa hybrid was when someone took an animated skeleton head Halloween decoration piece and synced it with Alexa so that the skeleton’s jaw moved when she talked. While pretty creepy, I at least saw some merit in using this as a party gag for Halloween. And then taking it down for the rest of the year (and maybe even forgetting about it by next year).
Big Mouth Bass + Alexa = Big Mouth Alexa
Apparently someone saw the SKullexa and thought “challenge accepted!” And so the Big Mouth Alexa was born. The Big Mouth Bass is an animated fish that sits on a wall plaque and annoying sings when prompted. Once paired with Alexa, a creepy fish could now give you the weather report. Oh, and Amazon embraced this terrible idea and officially released the functionality behind its AI assistant to the novelty fish product.
In conclusion, please make these stop.
