Voice assistants may hinder children's social and cognitive development, new research suggests.
Voice-activated smart devices are used to help children almost from the day they are born.
However, voice assistants, including Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Siri , could, according to new research, have a long-term impact on children's social and cognitive development, particularly their empathy, compassion and critical thinking skills.
"The multiple impacts on children include inappropriate responses, impaired social development, and hindered learning opportunities," said Anmol Arora, co-author of the study published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.
A key concern is that children are attributing human characteristics and behaviors to devices that, Arora said, are “essentially a list of trained words and sounds that are mashed together to make a sentence.”
Children anthropomorphize and then imitate the devices, copying their failure to change their tone, volume, emphasis, or intonation. Another issue is the machines' lack of automatic expectation of children to say please or thank you.
The devices are also limited in the types of questions they can answer.
There are also problems with recognizing different accents. "If a child is very young, they may not be able to pronounce certain words , and then there is a risk that will be misinterpreted and they will be exposed to something inappropriate," he said.
“These devices don’t understand what they’re saying,” he said. “All they do is bring back some information in response to a specific question, which may have been misunderstood anyway, without any real understanding of security or who’s listening.”
Dr. Ádám Miklósi, who recently published a study showing that smartphone and tablet use is “rewiring” children’s brains with long-term effects, called the research “important” and said more needs to be done to convince companies to take the issue seriously.
"Right now, these devices are very primitive because the people developing them don't care about human interaction or their 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 a lot more research, as well as ethical guidelines for their use by children.".
However, Dr. Caroline Fitzpatrick, the Canada Research Chair on Children's Digital Media Use and Its Effects, said she believes there is no reason for concern.
"It is true that children need rich context and stimuli to learn and develop vocabulary, which they currently cannot acquire by interacting with technology, because it provides very little information, tools and context," he said.
"But as long as parents stick to the recommended limits for children and they have a healthy amount of interaction with their parents and peers, then I don't think there should be any cause for concern," he added.
Source of information: theguardian.com
