Alexa, what happens when a trillion-dollar company outsources its menial work to pseudonymous volunteers?
Way back in 2019, Amazon announced that, going forward, any old idiot off the street could provide answers for its voice assistant Alexa to read aloud in response to questions from Alexa users. It turns out that many people played along, though perhaps not in the way Amazon intended. Instead of providing useful answers to hard-to-parse questions, a dedicated number of Alexa Answers pranksters have spent untold hours flooding the service with obvious trash.
Because the answers, as many of the people providing them long ago realized, don't have to be correct.
And yes, many of those obviously wrong responses are designated as "live" in Amazon's system — meaning, an Alexa-enabled device is simply waiting for the right prompt to read them aloud somewhere in the world.
"Who is mister poopypants?" reads one such question logged in the Alexa Answers system. "Jared Kushner," reads the reply which Amazon designated as "currently being shared with Alexa customers."
That answer was provided by an account with the name "Yabbah DaBadeux," a clear reference to Fred Flintstone's catchphrase. That account, like many others, has provided Alexa Answers with a mix of plausibly real and obvious fake answers — some potentially less humorous than others.
Thanks to a user-provided answer, in response to a question about what a quick Google search reveals to be a discount jewelry brand, Alexa essentially suggests drinking NyQuil and Coca-Cola. Which, when one considers the number of children using Alexa, could be a serious health risk.
Largely, though, the junk answers flooding Alexa Answers are harmless — albeit wrong.
We reached out to Amazon with a host of questions about Alexa Answers — Who approves the answers submitted by users? for example, and, What percentage are rejected? — and while a company spokesperson replied to our email, they didn't immediately answer any of our questions.
After the initial publication of this article, an Amazon spokesperson provided a statement claiming that a majority of Alexa Answers responses are rated as helpful by Alexa users.
"We make it clear to customers when they are receiving an Alexa Answers response, and have a multilayered moderation process in place, which includes automation, trained moderators, and customer feedback," wrote the spokesperson in part. "In the rare instances where we spot answers that do not meet our bar, we quickly remove them, as we have in this case."
This is more or less the same process described by the Alexa Answers Help Center.
"These answers are reviewed for quality by a combination of automated systems, community members, and Alexa Answers moderators before going live," the Help Center explains in part. "If your answer is accepted, it may be made available on Alexa next time a user asks the question you answered."
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That Alexa Answers is full of trash shouldn't come as a surprise. It's unpaid labor, and Amazon only rewards providers of answers via a nebulous points-and-cartoon-badge system. And those points, Amazon makes clear, have absolutely no real-world value.
"Currently, there is no way to redeem these points for anything on or off the Alexa Answers website," notes the Help Center.
It is perhaps surprising, though, that Amazon hasn't outsourced this Alexa Answers labor via its Mechanical Turk program. That program, unlike Alexa Answers, pays real money — albeit literal pennies.
Maybe then we could finally get Alexa to tell us the identity of the real Mr. Poopypants.
UPDATE: Feb. 24, 2022, 10:14 a.m. PST This story was updated to include comment from an Amazon spokesperson.
