From reminding the toddlers to go to the loo to telling bedtime stories and being used as a conversation partner, voice-activated smart devices are being used to help rear children almost from the day they are born.
New research suggests that voice assistants such as Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple s Siri could have a long-term impact on children's social and cognitive development, including empathy, compassion and critical thinking skills.
A key concern is that children attribute human characteristics and behaviour to devices that are, according to Arora, a list of trained words and sounds mashed together to make a sentence. The children anthropomorphise and then emulate the devices, copying their failure to alter their tone, volume, emphasis or intonation. The machines don't have automatic expectations for children to say please or thank you.
They are limited in the types of questions they can respond to. As a result, Arora said. Children are going to be learning very narrow forms of questioning and always in the form of a demand. There are problems with recognising different accents. If a child is particularly young, they might not be able to pronounce certain words properly, and then there s a risk that their words might be misinterpreted and exposed to something inappropriate, he said.
These devices don't understand what they are saying, he said. They are doing regurgitating some information in response to a narrow query, which it might have misunderstood anyway, without any real understanding of safety or who is listening to it. The research is important and said more needs to be done to make companies take the issue seriously, as recently published by Dr d m Mikl si, who recently published a study showing that smartphones and tablets are rewiring children's brains with long-term effects.
At the moment, these devices are very primitive because the people who develop them don't care about human interaction or their impact on children's development, he said.
He said that adults know how to use these devices but the way children use them, and the impact they have on children. There is little reason for concern, as well as ethical guidelines for their use by children, according to Caroline Fitzpatrick, the Canada Research Chair in Digital Media Use by Children and Its Implications for Promoting Togetherness: An Ecosystemic Approach.
It is true that children need rich context and cues to learn and develop vocabulary, but they can't get through interactions with technology because it only provides very minimal information and tools and context, she said.
She said that a child who was already timid or who spent too much time on their device might develop lower quality social skills and social competence than their peers, as well as difficulty using basic politeness formulations and poor non-verbal communication skills such as interrupting and not making eye contact. They would have lower quality relationships with their peers, teachers and family members, as well as increased social isolation.
She said that she doesn't think there should be cause for alarm as long as parents keep to the recommended limits for children, and they're getting a healthy amount of interaction from their caregivers and peers.