“Alexa, play Bad Manners.” Is it true that smart speakers are teaching children it’s ok to be impolite?
Could using Alexa make your child rude? An opinion piece in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood suggested that it could, as social conventions such as saying, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, aren’t always followed when talking to a digital assistant.[1] As we often find when we start to look a bit deeper, the role of digital assistants in children’s development is still very much up for debate.
The concerns about how talking to Alexa, Siri or Google Home might impact on your toddler’s understanding of social conventions, like saying please and thank you, are linked to how they view these devices.
We know that Alexa is a digital device using AI to respond to what we say, but the way we speak to these devices, “Hey, Siri..!” might lead to our children thinking they are like the other people they meet. Which means, when you say, “Alexa, play Twinkle, Twinkle,” your child thinks that is how you make a request, then it would be fine to say, “Daddy, get me a drink.”
But it isn’t quite that simple, and other people disagree.
In 2020, researchers from the University of Washington carried out a study of smart speaker use in 10 family homes. They found that parents used the speaker to help their children refine how they gave instructions, so the meaning was clear. And in one example, a parent used giving Alexa an instruction as an opportunity to remind their child to say, ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’.[2]
When this study was carried out there wasn’t a feature available on the smart speaker to encourage the use of please and thank you, but this has been introduced now.[3] Even without this feature, parents used talking to the smart speaker to help their children practise clear and polite communication.
What might be helpful to remember is that your toddler probably won’t really understand the difference between how you talk to a smart speaker and a person. After all, Alexa listens, talks and does things for them, just like the people around them.
The thing to take away from this article is that your toddler is learning from you all the time, even when you’re talking to Alexa or Siri – so maybe now is the time to remember to say, “Please play Twinkle, Twinkle, Alexa.”
References:
[1] Arora, A. & Arora, A. (2022). Effects of smart voice control devices on children: current challenges and future perspectives. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 107(12), 1129-1130.
[2] Beneteau, E., Boone, A., Wu, Y., Kientz, J.A., Yip, J., & Hiniker, A. (2020). Parenting with Alexa: Exploring the introduction of smart speakers on family dynamics. CHI ‘20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. April 2020. 1-13.
[3] Barr, S. (2018, 24 October). Amazon’s Alexa to reward children who behave politely. The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/amazon-alexa-reward-polite-children-manners-voice-commands-ai-america-a8325721.html