zlacker

>>rbanff+(OP)
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?

>>cmpb+u44
Last year my daughter was just learning to sound out words and write them, and was coming to me for help in spelling them to make little sentences. One day I was busy working, so I suggested she go ask alexa how to spell the words. An hour later she came back with a whole page story! After that, she'd go to alexa a few times a week to get help with spelling, and started exploring games and asking for other info.

>>abeh+2a4
This is a good example of how, when guided properly, this technology can obviously be of practical and positive use for children. Sure, if you still want to criticize you could say that the child should rather learn spelling with their parents/real humans, but hey... Get used to technology already.

Imo the biggest problem when introducing children to these devices is how to get them to understand that this is very different from an actual human. Even if you find proper wording that a 4yo would understand, these words are easily overwhelmed by the fact that you can talk to it like a normal person. It's already interesting to watch children slowly grasp the concept of (video) calls, but then taking the next step and understanding there isn't a person at the other end of the Alexa dot is yet another step, because if it isn't a human, what else is it?

>>iforgo+Ok4
My kids know “Siri” as simply a computer they can talk to. They think she’s basically a robot. Mine are 6, 5, 3. Since we use HomePods everywhere they interact with them really just like they would another UI but haven’t associated Siri with a person. It’s generally some variation of playing music or turning on HomeKit stuff. But they aren’t trying to have conversations. To them is just an iPad with no screen.