While kids have always found ways to cheat on their homework (remember copying off your friends?), a 6-year-old cleverly got Amazon’s Alexa to help him with a math assignment. And now people are calling him a genius for trying to game the system.
In a too-brief video, Jariel sits at a kitchen table and asks, “Alexa, what’s 5 minus 3?” The Amazon personal assistant then gives him the correct, but that’s when his mom, 24-year-old Yerelyn Cueva, yelled “Boy!” and cut the video, which has received more than 8 million views.
The incident took place last week in Paterson, New Jersey, and Yerelyn started rolling because she could hear him from the living room. “It was just any regular day of doing homework,” she told the New York Post. “I’m in the living room, and I overheard him asking Alexa some math problems, and I could not believe it! What you don’t see is after he says, ‘Thank you, Alexa, for helping me with my homework.”
Yerelyn said the family had only owned an Alexa for about a week when she caught her first-grader cheating on his homework. She was surprised because Jariel is good at math. “The funny thing is that math is actually his favorite subject,” she said. “I was surprised because he knows this stuff. He was just being lazy. Taking a shortcut.”
In the future, she imagines she’ll turn Alexa off while Jariel does his homework.
