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
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.

>>plainO+h84
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.

>>hrktb+pk4
> In that regard having a lot of your doings leaked to parents might not be that impacting.

I disagree. It was super stressful/impactful to me as a child. Knowing my parents would be called for misbehavior at school put undue stress on me all day after getting “an orange ticket” or later, detention. I’d get punished at school then punished worse at home.

Once, in first or second grade, my uncle divulged some petty thing I said to him in passing to my parents leading to a sit down talk. I was uncomfortable and angry. This damaged my trust.