While Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant may make people’s lives easier, it may also make their checkbooks smaller if they are not careful. That’s the lesson one Dallas, Texas family learned after their six-year-old inadvertently used the system to buy $170 worth of high-priced items.

Megan Neitzel got Amazon’s Echo Dot for the holidays, and her daughter seemed to be enamored with it, with Megan noting that she heard the child telling the machine knock-knock jokes. But apparently that wasn’t all she was doing.

Megan was shocked to suddenly receive a $170 bill for a dollhouse and four pounds of cookies that were purchased by her daughter. While the six-year-old insisted she didn’t order the items, she did admit to asking Alexa about both, and the machine took that as an order and purchased them for the family.

Megan has now learned her lesson and has activated parental controls, which will prevent purchases without giving Alexa a four digit code. By going public she’s hoping to warn other parents of the potential pitfalls of the device.

• Oh, and as for the dollhouse and the cookies, Meghan says the family enjoyed eating the baked goods, and is hoping to donate the dollhouse to a local charity.

Source: Fox News