Amazon's Echo and Echo Dot are little gadgets, not dissimilar to Siri or Cortana, that sit around your home collecting data on your various spending habits and whatnot. Beyond data gathering, playing music for your workout, or ordering you a pizza, it seems that these gizmos also have a passing interest in Bioware's sci-fi series, Mass Effect.
How have we come to this strange and confusing conclusion? Well, it turns out that there's an Easter egg lurking inside the tech, and if you ask the device: "Does this unit have a soul?" you will be greeted in turn by the phrase: "Keelah se'ai" (which means "by the home world I hope to see someday").
As detailed on Reddit, the first phrase was uttered by geth character Legion, a synthetic consciousness that featured prominently in the original Mass Effect trilogy. The reply is a greeting of quarian origin, the race that created these synthetic beings and that was subsequently brought low when they tried to exterminate them following their transition into self-consciousness. It's very meta, then.
Still, it's a great Easter egg for fans of Mass Effect as they await to upcoming release of Andromeda, the next entry in the sci-fi series, which is due to land on PC, PS4 and Xbox One on March 23.