Searching for Style
It’s interesting to watch young children use home assistants. They treat them like people, asking questions like “Alexa, how are you feeling?” and “Alexa, where are you?”. I often wonder what their motivation is. Maybe they don’t know the responses are scripted. Maybe the designers’ choice of which response to script is just as interesting to them as a human’s response would be.
Adults are no less inclined to anthropomorphization — Alexa is marketed as a her and not an it — but they’ve grown used to Alexa’s shortcomings as a conversationalist.
