Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders just inadvertently exposed a flaw in Amazon's Alexa voice-shopping platform
- Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted that her two-year-old ordered a Batman toy through Amazon's Alexa voice-shopping platform.
- Sanders said her kid did it by "yelling 'Batman!' over and over again into the Echo."
- This anecdote shows that the ease of voice shopping cuts both ways for customers interested in convenience.
Ordering items on Amazon from an Alexa-enabled device - so easy, a child could do it.
It turns out that ease of use might be a little bit of an issue. Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted on Sunday that her two-year old kid was able to order a toy from the device just by shouting "Batman!" at it.
"Alexa, we have a problem," she tweeted.
Amazon has attempted to lessen the friction for customers by making ordering super easy - maybe too easy. Though Alexa probably isn't going to accept a command as simple as "Batman!" it's easy to see a circumstance where the device gets confused in a loud room with a lot of people talking.
Taking Sanders' account as accurate, this is a concern for Amazon as it gets more of its Alexa-enabled devices in homes. If the voice-shopping features are just too easy to use - or too easily fooled - Echo owners might turn off the feature altogether and write it off as more trouble than it's worth.
Voice shopping is built for convenience, but an accidental order requires a whole lot more work, as customers will either have to ship the item back or reach out to the company to cancel it.
Amazon does have safeguards against this kind of thing. The app allows users to establish only certain voices as those that are enabled to purchase with their voice, or prompt select voices to give a specific four-digit code each time. This makes the whole process a bit less seamless, but it can cut out the hassle for certain households - especially ones with kids that love to ask Alexa to play the "Frozen" soundtrack.
As with any new platform, voice shopping has its kinks to work out.