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.”
Well presented.
ReplyDeleteAs 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! :-)