To Bring (or not) Alexa Home


The other day, one of my colleagues was telling me that her 5 year-old daughter had figured that Alexa, Amazon’s voice based assistant, could help with do her homework:
“Alexa, what is 5 + 8?”

I took this as exactly the kind of reason why I wouldn’t want Alexa in the home. When I was narrating this to my wife, my 7 yo daughter hung onto the conversation and joined in:
She: “Can we get Alexa too? I won’t use it for my homework.”
Me: “Then why do you want it?”
She: “When my friends come home, I can ask it to play nice songs.”
Wow!
-          Who wants to use a clunky remote for the music system and then discover you don’t have that song you wanted to hear anyway?
-          Searching via YouTube and Google on a computer/phone doesn’t come so easy for 5 and 7 yo’s, but with Alexa, they just ask for what they want!

Kids take to Alexa like ducks to water. Like my colleague learnt from her 5 yo:
“Mummy, don’t say ‘Play’ to Alexa. The song will start from the beginning. Say ‘Resume’ instead.”
And my daughter knew that Alexa can get angry, thanks to her experiences at her friend’s place:
“If you tell Alexa that she is an idiot or dumb, her top will glow red in anger. Then she’ll sulk and won’t answer anything for a few minutes.”

The friction in the way we interact with computers has dropped tremendously over time: from punch cards to command-line to mouse clicks to touch to (now) voice. I realize (again) I’m old when I ask questions like why I’d need Alexa in the home? Or whether it would spoil the kid? The future is what Ben Thompson says:
“The reality is — particularly when it comes to consumer products — is that in the long run, convenience always wins… You can be doing whatever you want; you can say something like, “Set a timer five minutes,” or “What temperature should I grill my steak to?” And you’ll get an answer with your hands busy, and altogether it’s going to be a more convenient answer than it would’ve been otherwise.”
And it will only get better over time, and do more things for you. And about kids, I guess taking the Thompson view is the practical approach:
“I tend to adopt the “the kids are going to be okay” mindset. There’s going to be new things that arise about it, new mores… Once you accept that it’s here, the best thing we can do is to figure out how to manage it going forward instead of pining for a world that is long gone.”

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarNovember 9, 2018 at 10:26 AM

    Well presented.

    As the conclusion says, "the kids are going to be okay" mindset is the right mindset. In that, if we plug in Wordsworth's famous line, "Child is the father of man", we can extrapolate to "the people are going to be okay with their attitude to adapt computers in life". :-)

    The blog writer might be knowing and maybe didn't consider it necessary to put this here. That is: Google is well advanced with its research to "communicate to the computer through hand gestures"! We humans read a lot in gestures. For example, if someone shrugs the shoulder, we conclude a resigned outlook etc. A time has come when, instead of even touching the screen, one can tell precisely all the requirements to the computers, through speech and hand gestures!

    Good that computers will turn into Alladin's genie one day, and that day is not too far. I pray that children do not demand that computers turn into real dinosaurs too, seeing our wish lists are answered satisfactorily! :-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more