Alexa’s ‘Brief Mode’ makes the digital assistant way less chatty

Not too long ago, people got creeped out by Amazon’s Alexa devices randomly laughing at them. Now Jeff Bezos’ digital assistant is offering folks the chance to put a sock in its mouth. Err, speaker. Reddit users first noticed that when asked to turn light on, Alexa would complete the task and then append the exchange by saying it’d be the last time it would use a verbal confirmation. Instead, it’d beep upon a task’s completion from that point forward, noting that this was a new feature called “Brief Mode” that’d curtail its speech. That was with a first-gen Echo. In our tests with a second-gen device, the same thing happened, with Alexa asking if we wanted to enable the different audio option.