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
This is sad. You have relegated your child's cognitive development to a cheap electronic device. He's supposed to be communicating with you and learning how to communicate with people, not crappy electronics designed to gather your info to sell you stuff.

>>jbob20+HD4
I appreciate the criticism, but I really don't feel that my child's cognitive development has been devalued in any way due to his occasionally being able to communicate with the Echo. The vast majority of his communication is with other people - which he loves participating in. I'll concede that these devices do probably attempt to sell us stuff, but up to this point, I have not seen anything from the Echo that I would consider nefarious or that seems like it might cause harm to my child's growth. In fact, my experience is that the Echo is basically harmless, especially compared to the behavioral problems that I've seen in children who watch TV or Youtube extensively (which I do not allow).