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>>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 live with my 6 & 9 year old nephews. I set up a Google Home in their bedroom and some in the common area's. It's been very interesting to watch them use it.

The 6 year old's pronunciation is not perfect and I could see a lot of frustration when he was initially using it. The drive to use the device has driven him to take his time and really focus on pronunciation so he can play the song or video's that he likes.

They understand it's a computer. But we all tend to treat it as an assistant. A really touching moment was when he used the Home to call "Santa." After he finished that call and we walked away, I saw/listened in My Activity that he asked to call God.