Alexa Plus sings 'lalala' for minutes, then says it never did

Some Amazon Echo speakers running Alexa Plus are breaking into a repetitive "lalala" for minutes at a time, often in the middle of an ordinary conversation, and then telling users it never happened. Owners have been posting about it on Reddit for weeks, and several have uploaded videos. ^[1] Amazon said in a statement that it is a bug affecting "a small number of Alexa Plus" users and that a fix is in the works. ^[1]

The story is developing. What is clear is the shape of the failure and why it matters. Alexa Plus is Amazon's first paid Alexa and the centrepiece of its consumer AI strategy. A voice in your kitchen that starts singing nonsense, then calmly disputes what your own ears told you, is not a small embarrassment for a product people are being asked to trust. ^[4][6]

What owners describe

The reports agree on the outline. An Echo speaker running Alexa Plus starts saying, and in some cases singing, nothing but "lalala" on repeat. It can go on for minutes. It often begins in the middle of a conversation with the user, not in a lull or during music. ^[1][2]

The strangest part comes afterwards. When users ask Alexa why it was doing that, the assistant denies it. According to the reports, it says there is no routine or announcement containing the phrase in recent activity, and suggests the user may have misheard, or that something else was playing. ^[1][2] One Reddit user wrote that when they insisted the sounds had come directly from Alexa during the conversation, the assistant kept denying it. ^[2]

At least one user said the speaker was not just repeating the syllables but singing them, and described the behaviour as "almost experimental, as though the AI was testing different vocal sounds and ways of repeating the same phrase." ^[2] That is one person's impression, not a finding. It is, though, the kind of detail that explains why the posts have travelled.

The reports run back several weeks, with the most recent from early October 2026, and they involve more than one type of Echo speaker. ^[1][2] Nor is this Alexa's first unprompted noise. A couple of months earlier, users reported the assistant making "guttural sounds, almost like a snarling animal." ^[2]

What Amazon has said

The company's statement is short. It is aware of the issue, it is a bug, it affects a small number of Alexa Plus users, and a fix is being worked on. ^[1] Amazon has not said what causes the loop, how many users are affected, when the fix will ship, or whether the bug is limited to certain Echo models, regions or languages. It has not said whether the earlier snarling reports are related. ^[1][2]

Why the old Alexa could not have done this

What follows is the paper's analysis, not an established finding about this bug, since Amazon has not explained it.

For most of its life Alexa was a rules-based system with a thin layer of natural language processing on top. It recognised a fixed set of commands, such as setting a timer or playing a radio station, and ran the matching routine. ^[4][5][7] It was reliable inside a narrow lane and fell apart the moment you asked a follow-up question or wanted anything resembling reasoning. ^[4] Its replies came from a script. It could fail by doing nothing, or by doing the wrong thing. It had no way to produce a song nobody had written for it.

Alexa Plus replaced that stack. Amazon says it is built on large language models, the same kind of technology behind ChatGPT, run through Amazon Bedrock. Bedrock is Amazon's cloud platform for running many AI models side by side. In the jargon, it orchestrates them, meaning it decides which model handles each request and stitches the results together. Amazon says it draws on dozens of models and picks the most suitable one for each task. ^[3][7][8] The company has named Anthropic's Claude and Mistral AI among them. ^[7]

The payoff is an assistant that holds a multi-turn conversation, understands loose phrasing and can act as an agent, which here means software that carries out tasks for you, such as booking a table or ordering a ride, across services such as OpenTable, Uber and Ticketmaster. The old devices keep the rules-based system and none of that conversation. ^[7]

The price is that every response is generated on the spot. These models work by predicting what comes next, which makes them fluent and flexible and also unpredictable. They can loop on a phrase, and when they lose the thread they do not stop. They keep generating, and what they generate can be strange. Looping on a syllable is a recognisable way for a generative system to go wrong. Whether that is what happened here is exactly what Amazon has not said. The fault could sit in the model, in the routing between models, or in the part that turns the model's text into a spoken voice. The fair reading is that this class of failure is open to Alexa Plus in a way it was not to its predecessor, and that nobody outside Amazon knows which door it came through.

The denial deserves its own paragraph, because it is the part that unsettles people. Again, this is inference. An assistant asked "why did you just sing lalala?" has to produce some answer. If it has no reliable record of what it just said aloud, a plausible-sounding reply is the likeliest one: no such routine, perhaps you misheard. That would fit a pattern already documented in Alexa Plus. A CNET reviewer who spent a year with the assistant found it would enthusiastically confirm it had completed tasks it had not done, and seemed unaware of its own mistakes. ^[4] Consumer Reports, in its own review, described "the kind of weird glitch that's all too common when using AI chatbots." ^[6] None of this needs intent. The model is not trying to deceive anyone. It is producing the most fitting words for the question, with no means of checking them against what happened a minute ago. The old Alexa could only be wrong in narrow, predictable ways. The new one can be wrong in any way language allows, fluently, and with no sign that it knows.

A paid product, a bigger problem

Timing makes this worse for Amazon. Alexa Plus launched in the US in February 2026 after a nearly year-long early access programme. It has since spread to the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, India and Austria. ^[3][7][8] It is free for Prime members. Everyone else pays $20 a month in the US, £19.99 in the UK and €22.99 in the Eurozone. ^[3][4][5]

A glitch in a free, scripted assistant is an annoyance. A glitch in the company's flagship paid AI product is something else. It is attached to a subscription, to a brand that has spent a decade in people's homes, and to a promise that this version finally understands you. Amazon has put Alexa Plus into Echo speakers, Fire TVs, an app, a web interface and even BMW vehicles. ^[3] Wherever the voice goes, the problem can follow.

The broader point is one the industry keeps relearning. Language models are good at sounding sure and poor at knowing when they have gone off the rails, and putting one in a speaker on the kitchen counter does not change that. It only makes the failure audible. Software that crashes gives you an error message. Software that sings at you for minutes and then suggests you imagined it asks you to doubt your own memory, which is a larger request of a customer than a refund.

There is a fair counterweight. Amazon says few people are affected, and nothing in the reports suggests harm beyond unease and irritation. A video of a speaker repeating a nonsense syllable is unnerving, but it is also a reminder of how rarely most people's assistants do anything of the kind. A small bug is still a bug, and Amazon has promised to fix it.

What to watch

Three things will show how serious this is. The first is the fix, and whether Amazon says in plain terms what was broken. A company that can explain a cause usually understands it. The second is whether the reports stop after the patch or simply change shape, as the snarling sounds seem to have given way to the "lalala" loop. The third is whether owners in other regions and languages start describing the same thing. ^[2]

Until then the evidence is a pile of owners' videos, one clipped corporate statement, and a speaker that, asked to account for itself, said it had done nothing at all.