Alexa should laugh more, not less, because people prefer social robots

Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant, was laughing when it shouldn't. You might have seen tweets about it: The weird, disembodied chuckle bothered people for reasons you can imagine, as well as because it reportedly could happen unprompted--our assistants, after all, are only supposed to listen and speak to us after they hear the wake word. We want them to tell us the weather and set kitchen timers on command, not spook us with laughter. We all know that virtual personas like Alexa, Siri, and the Google Assistant are not real humans. They can't laugh the way we laugh, because they are not alive.