OK, so it finally happened to me yesterday. Namely, the infamous case of your Echo spontaneously saying something and then playing music (or other streaming audio) without being prompted to do so by you or anyone else in the house. I had just walked upstairs and was rounding the corner to the master bedroom when I heard the Echo in there briefly saying something in Alexa's (I wasn't close enough to the door yet to make out what it said). I reached the doorway just as she finished talking, at which point the first few seconds of John Lee Hooker's
One Bourbon, One Scotch and One Beer played, and then stopped...with nary another sound coming from the Echo. I know this had nothing to do with any errant Bluetooth connection for three reasons:
- The only devices that have EVER been paired with that Echo are my old Samsung Galaxy S4 (which is no longer functional, and is sitting in a drawer with no battery in it) and its replacement, my Galaxy S7 Edge. At the time of the above-described incident, my S7 Edge was in the middle of a reboot and had not yet loaded the O/S, so could not have been connected to the Echo in any way.
- The day before (Saturday) I was downstairs experimenting with using the Alexa app on my S7 to initiate playback of songs on the downstairs Echo (not the one in the bedroom) from my Prime library. The last action I took on that was to have it play the first few seconds of...you guessed it...John Lee Hooker's One Bourbon, One Scotch and One Beer.
- There is nobody else in my home that ever uses any devices to connect with either Echo, ever.
This situation is identical to the symptoms so often reported of spontaneous brief speech followed by streaming audio (usually music) coming from the Echo with no household Bluetooth devices connected to it. This coupled with the fact that what was played was identical to what was requested via the Alexa app (which access your Alexa devices via the cloud, not BT) for my other Echo the day before VERY strongly points to a glitch of some sort in the Amazon server software that implements the Alexa service in which, on occasion, a command destined for an Echo is cached/queued (or otherwise stored) somewhere and, at some future time, is retrieved and acted up on again, sometimes sent to the wrong device (with "wrong" being defined as not the device the command was originally targeting).
Not knowing the internal details of the serve software I have no way of determining the exact mechanism involved, butthe evidence at hand combined with >30 years of troubleshooting software system issues tells me that these incidents are almost certainly being caused by one or more bugs in software on Amazon's servers, and are not being driven by any spontaneously connecting local (to the Echo) devices.
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