OROMOCTO, NB – A local man almost lost his home yesterday after his Amazon Alexa smart home device burst into flames. Lloyd Wentworth, 38, says the fire started as he was preparing dinner in his bungalow on Waasis Road.
“I wanted to make some gumbo so I asked Alexa to give me a recipe,” he said. “So the Alexa’s like, ‘Do you want me to read the recipe to you?’ I thought that was pretty cool so I says, ‘Oh, yeah, no, for sure.’”
“It got real quiet for a second then smoke started coming out of ‘er,” he continued. “I was about to throw a tea towel down when – BOOM – the whole Jesus thing goes off like some IED.”
The flames reached the nearby curtains which then quickly spread throughout the rest of the kitchen.
Firefighters arrived in time to limit the damage to the kitchen, which Wentworth says is a total loss.
Amazon has since issued a statement on behalf of Senior Vice President of Devices and Sevices Panos Panay and Senior Vice President and Head Scientist of Artificial General Intelligence Rohit Prasad, who together are in charge of Alexa.
“Research has confirmed that Canada continues to be a challenge for us. The Alexa family of smart home devices are designed to respond to simple commands in multiple languages. They are not, however, designed to handle Canada’s various weird regional dialects,” the statement read. “We have a whole division devoted to deciphering Newfoundland and another for Quebec. We’ll also be introducing a Canadian accent to Alexa. We just need to decide which region it should represent. Perhaps the East Coast with its delightful almost Irish lilt. Or Alberta with its frequent use of ‘fackin right bud..’ Toronto would be interesting but it needs to be determined how many times Alexa should say ‘mans’ or ‘fam.’ We still haven’t figured what to do when Canadians apologise to their Alexas.
When asked if he will purchase a new smart home device, Wentworth responded, “Yeah, no.”
