Voice assistants could ‘hinder children’s social and cognitive development’

From reminding potty-training toddlers to go to the loo to telling bedtime stories and being used as a "conversation partner", voice-activated smart devices are being used to help rear children almost from the day they are born.

But the rapid rise in voice assistants, including Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple's Siri could, researchers suggest, have a long-term impact on children's social and cognitive development, specifically their empathy, compassion and critical thinking skills.

"The multiple impacts on children include inappropriate responses, impeding social development and hindering learning opportunities," said Anmol Arora, co-author of an article published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.

A key concern is that children attribute human characteristics and behaviour to devices that are, said Arora, "essentially a list of trained words and sounds mashed together to make a sentence."

The children anthropomorphise and then emulate the devices, copying their failure to alter their tone, volume, emphasis or intonation. Another issue is the machines' lack of automatic expectation for children to say please or thank you.

Devices are also limited in the types of questions they can respond to. "As a result, children are going to be learning very narrow forms of questioning and always in the form of a demand," said Arora, a researcher at the school of clinical medicine at Cambridge University.

There are also problems with recognising different accents. "If a child is particularly young, they might well not be able to pronounce particular words properly and then there's a risk their words might be misinterpreted and they're exposed to something inappropriate," he said, citing an example where a 10-year-old girl was exposed to an online challenge where she was told to touch a live electric plug with a coin.