Voice Assistants Can Affect Kids Thinking & Cognitive Development

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Researchers have shown that using digital assistants like Alexa may have a major impact on kids’ capacity for empathy and compassion, as well as their ability to think critically.

Nearly from the moment they are born, voice-activated smart devices are being used to aid in the parenting of children. From reading bedtime stories to reminding children to use the restroom to acting as a “conversation buddy,” these devices are finding widespread use.

Researchers warn that voice assistants’ meteoric rise could have a lasting impact on the social and/or cognitive development of children, specifically on their capacity for quick learning, critical thinking, and compassion. This is especially true given the prevalence of devices like Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Apple’s Siri.

Voice Assistants

“The multiple implications on children include incorrect responses, restricting social development, and hurting learning potential,” said Anmol Arora.

One of the biggest concerns, according to Arora, is that kids would connect human traits and actions to robots that are “essentially simply a set of programmed words and sounds mashed together to form a statement.”

The kids give the electronics human traits and then play out those traits by imitating the gadgets’ monotone voices and lack of emphasis and inflection. Another issue is that the robots don’t know to wait for the kids to say “please” and “thank you.”

Further, there are limits to the scope of questions that can be addressed by machines. As a result, “young people are going to be learning incredibly specific sorts of asking and always in the form of a demand,” says Arora, a researcher at Cambridge University in the department of clinical medicine.

In addition, there are difficulties associated with pinpointing individual speakers’ accents. A girl of 10 was subjected to an online challenge in which she was instructed to touch a live electric plug with a coin because “if a youngster is extremely young, they might easily not be able to speak some terms properly,” he added.

He warned that there was a possibility of unsuitable material being shown to the students since their statements could be misunderstood. A youngster “could easily not be able to speak some words properly” if they are very young, he said.

According to him, the gadgets in question can’t understand what’s being said to them. “All it’s doing is spitting out the same old information in response to a question it might have misread, with no regard for whether or not anyone is listening,”

Dr. dám Miklósi published a study recently, showing that children’s smartphone and tablet use is rewiring their brains with long-term ramifications, said that more effort was needed to urge companies to take the subject seriously.

“These smart devices, at the moment, are pretty basic because the individuals who build them don’t think about the human connection or the impact that they have on the development of children,” he said. The developers of these systems “don’t care.”

He continued, “They understand how adults use these smart voice assistants, but how children use them and the impact of these devices on children is entirely different.” Children are affected differently than adults by these situations. “Much more study is required, including with ethical guidelines for its usage by children.”

Dr. Caroline Fitzpatrick, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Digital Media Use by Children and Its Implications for Promoting Togetherness: An Ecosystemic Approach, disagrees, saying that parents have little to worry about in this area.

There is a risk that “a child who was already timid or who spent too much time on the tablet would acquire lower quality social skills and social competency than their peers,” she said. This involves “poor non-verbal communication skills,” such as interrupting and avoiding eye contact, and “difficulty employing fundamental politeness phrases.”

These children would become increasingly isolated from their peers and adults, and their relationships with those closest to them would deteriorate.

She went on to say that she didn’t think parents had anything to worry about as long as they followed the recommended limits set for their children and made sure they had plenty of time to interact with their caregivers and peers.