In 2016, venture capitalist Hunter Walk wrote a Medium post about the Amazon Echo which he described as magical, but added that it was adversely affecting his child's behaviour.
The reason he gave was the lack of manners required to get a response.
"Cognitively I'm not sure a kid gets why you can boss Alexa around but not a person," he wrote.
In January 2018, the research company ChildWise published a report warning that children who grew up accustomed to speaking that way to a virtual personality might become aggressive in later dealings with humans.
I'm all for being weary of Internet connected devices with children for both developmental and privacy concerns. But it seems that this concern of kids learning to be rude by the terse commands given to Alexa or Siri is rather ridiculous. Yes, I expect there will be some learning required for the child to separate talking to a human-sounding device vs talking to a human, but that's ok. I have every confidence that children and parents are up to the task. Their interaction with pets is perhaps a good example of why this isn't a problem. Nearly any child who has a pet, especially a dog, will issue commands to that pet different than they will ask a person. We issue very terse commands: Sit. Stay. Come. Fetch. I don't recall there ever being concern about such rude commands impacting communication with humans. One difference between pets and an Alexa enabled device of course is that Alexa sounds human and speaks back. but in an age where children are regularly exposed to television and video games, which have their own real-sounding fake people, of which children already do well learning to separate real from fake, I can't see these devices as any more worrisome in that regard.
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