Children’s curiosity about the world around them drives them to ask their teachers and parents questions — but now voice assistants and other artificial intelligence can facilitate their learning. 

Researcher Siqi Yi, a doctoral candidate in the School of Information, is studying this new learning development and its impacts. 

For Yi’s research, children ages 6-10 will receive a second-generation Google Nest mini smart speaker to use for two weeks. At the end of the period, she said she would use the device log files to understand questions children usually ask at home, the length of the interaction time and the number of times they can successfully get the answer they want from the smart speakers. 

Yi said an advantage of the speaker is that it directly responds to a user’s inquiries or commands rather than simply providing information through text. This makes the device more accessible for younger children who might have difficulties reading texts with complicated sentence structures. 

However, Yi said voice assistants still have room for improvement to support children’s learning, as they occasionally cannot understand the children’s questions. 

“If that happens too many times, children will just be disappointed and upset about that and decrease the (amount of) time they interact with these devices,” Yi said. “Automatic speech recognition should be improved to train these systems with (an expanded) database that includes children’s speech instead of adults’ speech.” 

Parents also play an important role in guiding their children’s use of technology, Yi said.

“If the smart speaker doesn’t understand the children’s question, parents can teach them how to paraphrase or ask the question in another way,” Yi said. “That can also improve their digital literacy as they grow up and use different search engines.” 

Yi said the children asked the smart speakers a range of questions, including homework-related queries on spelling and definitions of words and more abstract questions.

“Their generation (has) different resources and technologies available,” Yi said. “They just need to navigate and see how these technologies can better support their learning and growth.”