Study examines if Alexa or Siri make kids bossy

Washington : A new study examined if kids hanging out with Alexa or Siri changed their behaviour towards their fellow human beings.
The research has been published in the ‘Interaction Design and Children Conference Journal’.
The team had a conversational agent teach 22 children between the ages of 5 and 10 to use the word “bungo” to ask them to speak more quickly. The children readily used the word when a robot slowed down its speech. While most children did use bungo in conversations with their parents, it became a source of play or an inside joke about acting like a robot. But when a researcher spoke slowly to the children, the kids rarely used bungo, and often patiently waited for the researcher to finish talking before responding.
“We were curious to know whether kids were picking up conversational habits from their everyday interactions with Alexa and other agents,” said senior author Alexis Hiniker, a UW assistant professor in the Information School.
“A lot of the existing research looks at agents designed to teach a particular skill, like math. That’s somewhat different from the habits a child might incidentally acquire by chatting with one of these things,” she added.
The researchers recruited 22 families from the Seattle area to participate in a five-part study. This project took place before the COVID-19 pandemic, so each child visited a lab with one parent and one researcher. For the first part of the study, children spoke to a simple animated robot or cactus on a tablet screen that also displayed the text of the conversation.