Tag Archives: alexa

Balancing working from home, schooling from home, playing at home, and just having the entire family at home during these times can be a challenge. For families who have dedicated voice assistants, like the Echo or Google Home, there might be some strategies parents can use to help augment their parenting tasks during these times of social distancing and sheltering in place. I was a member of a research team which investigated how families adopt and use smart speakers, like…

As a speech-language pathologist, I am fascinated with how humans and voice interfaces (such as Amazon’s Echo, “Alexa”) communicate with each other. I was fortunate to be a member of a research team based at the University of Washington, in which we recruited 10 diverse families to incorporate an Amazon Echo Dot into their homes for the first time. As researchers, we wanted to learn and understand how families incorporate the fast-growing technology of dedicated, home-based, voice interfaces in their homes.…