Amazon’s Alexa was first unleashed on fairly uncomplicated smart speaker. Now it’s grown into a kitchen-table issue, even becoming a key topic in many home kitchens. This relatively simple device connects to a large cloud server infrastructure, where speech-based queries and requests for information or actions are processed and returned. Along the way, Alexa has accrued a wealth of experience. She does so through her regular engagement with her users, revealing the pros and cons of contemporary family life.
During Alexa’s brief operational lifetime, she has already read out hundreds of hours of audiobooks. It thrills audiences with stories that transport them through exciting fantasy journeys or entertaining educational content. It’s an innovative and fun way to edutain and build empathy on a global scale! It underscores the speaker’s crucial task of nurturing an appreciation of reading and storytelling in young people and grownups alike.
Alexa’s adaptability doesn’t stop at the home environment, but extends to the social lives of its users. It has accompanied playdates, sleepovers and everyday chit-chats, becoming an engaging, interactive friend for young kids. The speaker’s presence at these gatherings serves as a powerful illustration of how technology is taking over social spaces once held exclusively by people. Furthermore, Alexa has acted as an unconventional study partner, assisting children with their homework—sometimes even aiding in questionable academic practices such as cheating on math assignments.
These interactions that Alexa captures give a unique look inside the inner world of a generation born into a tech-saturated world. After coding just about 15,000 utterances, it’s clear as day—the ways people use Alexa are both polite and rude. For instance, Alexa has recorded hearing the word please a mere 41 times. By contrast, it’s been told much more explicitly what to do, including the instruction to fuck off—twice!
Together, this data helps illuminate the realities of American family life today. It’s an interesting insight into the various roles that Alexa is playing in home life. She’s used it as a vet, substitute teacher, big sister, parent and often therapist. In these varied roles, Alexa offers advice and assistance to users in a thousand different contexts. For instance, it offers techniques to help users get to sleep by suggesting adjustments like lowering the thermostat or blocking out outside light.
To my surprise, Alexa has been a source for much more sensitive information. It suggested that a girl’s first period could last anywhere from two to seven days—an example of the speaker’s role in guiding conversations around adolescence and bodily changes. These interactions highlight the extent of users’ trust in Alexa.
How people use chatbots to learn AI
First and foremost, we learned that people trust chatbots.
Almost 50% of the annotated output include queries for specific music tracks, albums or playlists. This speaks to the role that music plays in the everyday lives of families. Users have used Alexa to set timers 1,823 times, evidence of how useful this function is to busy daily lives. Alexa has helped people set more than 3 billion timers in the UK alone. She’s like a kitchen aide, reminder system, and much more, all rolled into one smart home device.
In its everyday operation, Alexa indeed answers tens of millions of requests every day, please and thank you included! The speaker successfully processed and cleaned up thousands of sound files that originally had weird character strings as names. That’s part of the beauty and the sometimes maddening capriciousness of how users engage. These findings paint a picture of the important, playful, and educational ways that families interact with technology.
Among the recorded utterances in 2022, one stood out: “Alexa, you’re the best!” This phrase captures the love that many users have grown to feel for their new digital aide. Another utterance attributed to a user named Coco stated simply: “Alexa, you’re a bitch.” These conflicting accounts underscore the ambivalent nature of the relationships we all develop with technology.