
Alexa, be my friend: Children talk to technology, but how does it respond? - rbanffy
http://www.washington.edu/news/2018/08/06/alexa-be-my-friend-children-talk-to-technology-but-how-does-it-respond/
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hemmert
I heard of a boy who had learned to repeat, slowly, a command when Alexa
didn't do what he wanted - often a voice recognition issue.

Soon, he started to apply that scheme also to talking to their parents:

"Mom, I want vanilla ice cream."

"No, you had enough."

"Mom - I - want - va - nil - la - ice - cream."

~~~
rhaps0dy
"Make me a sandwich"

"No"

"Sudo make me a sandwich"

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cmpb
I put an Echo Dot in my son’s room a couple months after he was born to play
music/white noise for him to fall asleep easier and to make the mornings
easier when getting him ready (so that, for instance, I can use it to
ascertain news/weather/daily travel info). Over the past year and a half since
I put it in his room, he has of course been developing rapidly in his
cognitive abilities, and he’s finally at the point now where he can wake the
device on his own. It’s been several months of trying to talk to it, mostly by
mimicking the simpler commands that he hears me say.

It’s interesting to me that he has grown up speaking at the Echo and slowly
learning how to communicate with it in much the same way that he is learning
to communicate with other people. His communicative learning progress is
definitely a lot slower with the Echo than with me, but that makes sense since
he spends a lot more time with people than with the Echo. Even still, I was
very impressed the other day when he woke the Echo (and then promptly told it
to “stop”, which has been in his vocabulary for a while now).

I’m not sure there’s any real point to this outside of just an interesting (to
me) anecdote. And I guess it’s probably time I take the Echo out of his room,
or at least figure out how to lock it down, so he doesn’t get into anything
age-inappropriate or buy 500 cans of tomato sauce or something.

Anybody else have any interesting experiences with their little ones learning
to communicate with smart devices?

~~~
plainOldText
I think your tale begs the question: How will your son's (or any other child's
for that matter) notion of personal privacy be shaped by the use of technology
from a very early age? I think we'll have to wait and see, as this will be
highly interesting.

~~~
hrktb
Fair question. I wonder if it might change much thought, depending on the
frame of reference.

I think a lot of us grew up with siblings in the same room. Rooms didn’t lock.
Parents not looking but knowing all too well what’s going on. Schools
reporting on behavior by phone or by letter that as a kid you didn’t get to
see.

I think for me the notion of ‘privacy’ was just being left alone with no one
bothering me. It’s only as an adult that I have a clear perimeter where no one
should be able to step in. In that regard having a lot of your doings leaked
to parents might not be that impacting.

~~~
gumby
...I think a lot of us grew up with siblings in the same room. Rooms didn’t
lock.

Indeed, but those were your family members. You knew them well and there was
context, for good or ill.

But in this case the device is a bunch of strangers. Perhaps no one stranger
listening in, but everything being processed off site and added to the profile
Amazon or Google is building about you.

~~~
feocco
The device is not a bunch of strangers. There's no humans listening to "your"
conversation. Though they may be listening to anonymized clips. The activity
stored is also your own to control.

I think such privacy concepts are too abstract for a child to be concerned
about. You'd be hurting their view of technology and enforcing an idea of Big
Brother if you were to teach them a voice assistant is a bunch of strangers
listening to you.

~~~
gumby
I think facebook+cabridge analytica et al, and google's collection of location
data even when the user opts out (just to name two), shows that it really is a
bunch of strangers listening to you.

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jakeogh
Alexa should be treated as a different kind of stranger. I think it's a huge
mistake for children to talk to computers. It's inherently dishonest for a
single voice to represent something so manipulative and fluid as if it's a
person.

Amusing example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MECcIJW67-M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MECcIJW67-M)

~~~
wiz21c
It's not amusing at all. It's incredibly spot on. Alexa has very limited
knowledge and 0 interpretation skills, but, worse than all, behaves as if it
does.

(note that, in a sense, a book has very limited knowledge and 0 interpretation
skills, but its behaviour is passive).

~~~
giancarlostoro
Indeed, I hate that AI is such a buzzword when what we have are a fraction of
where we need to be. We have jigsaw puzzle pieces, really tiny ones in what
feels like an infinitely large (or who knows how many pieces) jigsaw puzzle.

I don't mind them being called "Voice Assistants" though, but don't tell me
it's AI or ML, since it doesn't truly learn, it calibrates your voice if
anything. It doesn't do a darn thing on it's own, someone has to tell it to do
that thing, like in some cases the very human communicating. When they are
fully autonomous... THEN I'll be happy, and creeped out at the same time.

The real change with AI will be if the masses are allowed to build their own
relatively easily enough. When even kids are allowed to be creative with
different AI's it will get interesting enough.

Sadly some megacorp will buy it out and lock it up is more likely to happen.

~~~
auslander
> ... but don't tell me it's AI or ML, since it doesn't truly learn

Give it time and it'll be like in the movies. I'm a tinfoil hat, vpns,
adblockers, but that youtube made me want one, it's funny :)

~~~
giancarlostoro
Maybe Mycroft?

[https://mycroft.ai/](https://mycroft.ai/)

------
miguelmota
This is what happens when children talk to Alexa:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epyWW2e43UU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epyWW2e43UU)

~~~
wiz21c
The question of the father (I guess) is : "Bobby what were you doing ?". That
is an issue to me.

People are not choosing Alexa/siri/whatever, they dream about it.

------
melling
Don’t we have a general problem where voice interaction is primitive on all
devices?

I use Siri and Alexa almost daily. I feel like we have a very long way to go.

~~~
cm2187
It’s funny watching Leo Laporte’s podcasts on twit.tv. He surrounds himself
with those assistants. And despite having a crystal clear, radio voice all the
devices either are triggered by mistake or ask him to repeat half of the time.

Now if you are doing a tech radio show, this has a high entertainment value.
If you are busy, in the middle of something and need a task done, these
repeated failed interactions are a complete non starter. Imagine a smartphone
where the screen wouldn’t register a tap half of the time, it would end up in
a bin very quickly.

Plus I am not sold on non self-discoverable UIs. Like I don’t remember the
name of all the operas I have on my phone. It takes seconds to browse with a
screen. Same things for the commands. If forcing users to learn by heart
dozens of commands was commercially viable, we would still be using MS DOS!
But GUIs are way more powerfull.

~~~
vidarh
GUI's are faster when you're near the device and don't have your hands full or
when the command is complicated. But I have Echo's in various forms in most
rooms now because while I also find discoverability an annoying issue there
are plenty of commands that are obvious enough to learn quickly that work for
the easy cases that you do all the time. A dozen or so commands covers maybe
90% of what I want it for.

------
stilley2
Random story: my niece was visiting shortly after we got an echo, and we
showed it to her and told her to ask it a question. She held something up and
asked, "Alexa, what color is this?" Cue trying to explain to her that Alexa
doesn't have eyes.

~~~
PhilipA
We had a similar experience - my 4 year old asked her what the password was.
Luckly Alexa was confidential :)

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setzer22
It's not very scientific to set up an experiment to test a hypothesis, then
mess up in some way (they forgot to turn voice recognition on) and fix it by
changing the hypothesis afterwards. However, I understand they couldn't let
all the effort they put into it go to waste...

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bopbop
According to a study reported in this article in Motherboard, children are
easily peer pressured by robots.

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3qqep/children-a...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3qqep/children-
are-easily-peer-pressured-by-robots-study-finds)

When you add in the idea of their constant childhood pal being a device
designed to sell them items from Amazon, it's quite worrying.

If you wanted to take a positive spin on it, you could see it as the possible
beginnings of a form of digital post-scarcity centrally controlled economy
communism, I suppose.

------
candiodari
I've seen my kids try this. Very weird. They want to just talk to Google
assistant, rather than get anything done. Google assistant does not work very
well for this use case.

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jakeogh
Interesting asymmetry:
[https://i.redd.it/rnoc8y7fjxg11.jpg](https://i.redd.it/rnoc8y7fjxg11.jpg)

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vectorEQ
"Your daughter pauses, stammers, mispronounces a few words. She’s a beginner,
after all."

give her some real toys or let her play outside if she's not of the age to
even speak normal. don't put little children to have some internet bot as a
friend because you're lazy parent/.

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oldsklgdfth
Would you let your kids socialize with a used car salesman?

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FreeTrade
You should ask Alexa once or twice a day for whom she works. To remind
yourself what you have in your home.

~~~
dang
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, and especially not the flamey
kind.

~~~
spacehome
You're wrong on this one. The comment was substantive.

~~~
dang
People seem to agree. Perhaps I read it wrong!

~~~
pvg
Probably not, given that nobody has managed to explain its supposed insight or
wit.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik)

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la6470
[https://themighty.com/2017/11/amazon-alexa-helping-child-
dis...](https://themighty.com/2017/11/amazon-alexa-helping-child-disability/)

[https://growingupbilingual.com/2018/tech-and-
gadgets/8-ways-...](https://growingupbilingual.com/2018/tech-and-
gadgets/8-ways-amazons-echo-kids-edition-is-a-great-tool-for-kids-with-
special-needs/)

There are tons of examples on the net

~~~
dzdt
I clicked on the growingupbilingual link. About every third word is a
highlighted brand. I have trouble reading it as a personal account when it
looks so much like advertising.

~~~
deadbunny
They are linking to the things being discussed. God forbid people use
hyperlinks on a website.

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908087
It responds by profiling, grooming and manipulating them from a very young
age.

"Aww look, my 3 year old is having a conversation with a massive advertising
corporation, and has begun talking to human beings the same way he talks to an
inanimate object. How cute!"

