Students enrolled in UNIB10019 Italian Patisserie were dismayed to discover last week that the soothing voice of their professor was in fact Amazon Alexa in disguise. The virtual assistant spent the lecture reading paragraphs directly off the slides in lieu of Professor Hopkins, who was ill that day. Nobody noticed until the end of the class. The Grub has since spoken to second-year student Miles Rutherford who attended the lecture.

“It’s hard to stay focused in that class, but I’m still surprised nobody looked up and saw that our lecturer was a black cylinder on a desk”, says Mr Rutherford.

Students became suspicious when Alexa started playing David Bowie songs on shuffle.

“At first we were all so impressed! We were like, damn! She can sing really well. But then she started doing the instruments as well and we’re like, nah, something’s fishy here”.

Professor Hopkins ostensibly caught a cold last Tuesday and so bought the device to deliver her lecture, believing it would reach her high standards of dictation when presented with a prewritten slab of text. She has since been reprimanded by the university, who have told her she should have bought a Google Echo instead.

“Google Echo is a far more engaging than Alexa, even exceeding some of our best lecturers in liveliness,” says spokesperson from the University of Melbourne, Chloe Henderson. “It’s disappointing that Ms Hopkins chose a dull medium to deliver her two-hour lecture about bread”.

Ms Henderson declined to comment on the university’s rumoured plans to replace all lecturers with Google Echo.