A Decade After Alexa's Launch, Researchers Study Its Effect on Children

Amazon introduced the Echo speaker, and the voice behind it, Alexa, on November 6, 2014, then opened the device to the public the following July. A little more than a decade later, roughly one in four Americans owns one, and a good share of those households own two or three. Kids in these homes grow up talking to Alexa the way they talk to a sibling, tossing out orders and insults without much thought.

A child who feels close to the family's Alexa grows more demanding toward the device. This same bond also raises how often the child curses at the assistant. Please and thank you rise right alongside the insults, tied to this same closeness. All three measures come from a German study covering two and a half years inside 128 households, watching how families talk to their voice assistants.

Researchers published these results in "Alexa, Shut Up!," a 2025 paper out of the University of Duisburg-Essen, led by Clara Strathmann with coauthors Aike Horstmann, Jessica Szczuka, and Nicole Krämer. Parents answered the same survey every six months for two and a half years, from July 2019 through January 2022, reporting on their own manners with Alexa or Google Assistant and their children's manners too.

Most children were too young to fill out the survey alone, so a parent answered for the whole household. The setup shaped what researchers measured in children, commanding language, verbal abuse, and politeness, the behaviors visible to a parent standing in the room. Parents also answered questions about how much they saw the device as a social presence rather than a plain tool, and how satisfied they felt with the device.

Commanding language went down over time, for parents and children both, the opposite of what the researchers expected walking in. Cursing at the device stayed flat the whole two and a half years, with no measurable relationship to time at all. Closeness alone predicted the rise across all three measures, commanding language, cursing, and politeness together, in children. Adults showed a different pattern. For adults, feeling close to the assistant only predicted more politeness.

Nathan Burton and James Gaskin ran a different test in 2019, surveying and observing 274 college students at BYU to see if rudeness toward Siri or Alexa carried into how people treated each other. The carryover never showed up. Gaskin said afterward, "There is no need for adults to say 'please' and 'thank you'" to a digital assistant, since adults seemed to keep the two relationships apart. Burton and Gaskin wanted to run the same test on children next, expecting a different outcome. The German team ended up covering the population BYU set out to study, and found the split Burton and Gaskin had predicted, though neither of them got the chance to run the test themselves.

Amanda Cercas Curry and Verena Rieser had already mapped part of the mechanism in 2018, studying how conversational systems respond to abuse. Alexa and Google Assistant, in their data, mostly ignored a rude request outright or failed to parse the words and shut off. Amazon already had a "magic word" feature rewarding polite phrasing when Google introduced "Pretty Please" in 2018, a setting built into Google Assistant through Family Link. Neither device registers an insult the way a person would.

Both companies built these responses for a market already inside thousands of kitchens. NPR and Edison Research counted 157 million smart speakers in US homes in their 2020 Smart Audio Report. The UK's ChildWise Monitor Report put ownership among families with children near 40 percent around the same period.

Strathmann and her coauthors stop short of connecting the dots all the way to human relationships. Their data covers a machine in one room of a house, watched for six waves and two and a half years, long enough to rule out one bad afternoon. The carryover into conversations with real people stays a separate question, one the paper leaves for later research. The paper states its findings "tackle the concern" about spillover into human-to-human communication, without settling the point.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Sharing the original posts or links from FRONTeras on social media is allowed and appreciated.