Mary Beth Foster has three Google Home units throughout her Mint Hill, N.C., home, and her two-year-old often talks with them, walking up to them as if they are another person.
Recently, while her husband took a shower, her son had an entire conversation with the device. “He asked it to play music, and it did,” she said. “And he asked what the weather was. I guess he heard us do that. It told him it was cloudy. And then he asked, ‘What’s a cloudy day?’ And it defined it for him.”
Foster chalks up these discussions as a funny fact of modern life. His first words were “OK Google,” after all.
But these kinds of interactions also are fueling new research and questions about the relationships kids are forging with the robots and voice-activated assistants in our homes. According to a March report released by Common Sense, four in 10 parents of kids ages 2 to 8 say their families have a smart speaker. Of those, 32% say their kids talk to their smart speakers a few times a day — 6% say a few times an hour or more. Read more...
More about Robots, Smart Home, Alexa, Smart Speakers, and Small Humansvia Tingle Tech