2023-09-08 09:50:55
A small hot tub, 45 Spider-Man walkie-talkies, 112 water slides: A Utah father warned parents of young children to check the settings of their Alexa voice devices after his son ordered nearly 1,000 worth US$ in toys on Amazon.
“Parents, make sure you turn off voice purchases on your Alexa app so this doesn’t happen to you,” dad Tucker Bonham recently insisted in a video on TikTok, reported by “The Mirror” on Friday.
The father of three young children shared his misfortune after realizing that nearly US$1,000 worth of toys ordered on Amazon had to be delivered to his home that day and in the following days.
It was by going into the device’s application that he would have been able to listen again to the recordings of the commands, made by his 5-year-old son.
“Alexa, give me a monster truck that jumps 23 inches off the ground. Alexa, adds 45 Spider-Man children’s walkie-talkies […] a small jacuzzi […] 112 water slides in my cart. Alexa, get me a rocket that rises 45 feet from the ground,” the child allegedly commanded in the extracts shared by his father, which had reached more than 2.6 million on the platform.
In total, the boy would have talked for more than two hours with the device, his father said, describing the recordings as “quite entertaining”.
But according to Dr. Anmol Arora of the University of Cambridge, this type of interaction between a “socially and emotionally” developing child and this kind of device could have long-term consequences on “empathy, compassion and critical thinking,” he wrote in the journal “Archives of Disease in Childhood,” according to “The Mirror.”
“With digital devices, there is no expectation that polite terms, such as please or thank you, will be used. It is not necessary to take into account the tone of voice, nor to know whether the order issued could be interpreted as rude or odious,” he would have clarified.
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