From reminding potty-trained kids to go to the bathroom to telling bedtime stories and being used as a “conversation partner,” voice-activated smart devices are being used to help parenting children almost from the day they are born.
But the rapid rise of voice assistants, including Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple’s Siri, researchers suggest, could have a long-term impact on children’s social and cognitive development, specifically their empathy, compassion and skills of critical thinking.
“The multiple impacts on children include inappropriate responses, impeding social development and hindering learning opportunities,” said Anmol Arora, co-author of a paper published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.
A key concern is that children attribute human characteristics and behavior to devices that are, Arora said, “essentially a list of trained words and sounds put together to form a sentence.”
Children anthropomorphize and then emulate the devices, copying their fault to alter their tone, volume, emphasis, or intonation. Another problem is the lack of automatic expectation of the machines for children to say please or thank you.
Devices are also limited in the types of questions they can answer. “As a result, children will be learning very limited forms of questioning and always in the form of a demand,” said Arora, a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s school of clinical medicine.
There are also problems recognizing different accents. “If a child is particularly young, they may not be able to pronounce certain words correctly and then there is a risk that their words will be misinterpreted and they will be exposed to something inappropriate,” he said, citing an example in what a 10 year old boy. -the old lady was exposed to an online challenge where she was told to touch an electrical outlet with a coin.
“These devices don’t understand what they’re saying,” he said. “All they’re doing is regurgitating a bit of information in response to a limited query, which they might have misunderstood anyway, without any real understanding of security or who’s listening.”
Dr Ádám Miklósi, who recently published a study showing smartphone and tablet use is “rewiring” children’s brains with long-term effects, called the research “important” and said that more needs to be done to get companies to take the problem seriously.
“At the moment, these devices are very primitive because the people developing them don’t care about human interaction or its impact on children’s development,” he said.
“They know how adults use these devices, but the way children use them and the impact they have on children is very different,” he added. “We need much more research as well as ethical guidelines for its use in children”
But Dr. Caroline Fitzpatrick, the Canada Research Chair in Children’s Digital Media Use and Its Implications for Promoting Coexistence: An Ecosystem Approach, said she thought there was little cause for concern. .
“It’s true that children need rich context and cues to learn and develop vocabulary that they currently can’t get through interactions with technology because it only provides very minimal information and tools and context,” she said.
“A child who was already shy or spent too much time on their device might develop social skills and social competence of lower quality than their peers, as well as difficulty using basic parenting and poor non-verbal communication skills, such as interrupting and not making eye contact,” he said. “These children would have lower quality relationships with their peers, teachers and family and greater social isolation.
“But as long as parents stick to the recommended limits for children and have a good amount of interaction from their carers and peers, then I don’t think there’s any cause for alarm,” he added.
This article was amended on 28 September 2022 to clarify that concerns about the long-term effect of the devices were raised in a journal article, not a new research paper.