Can talking to Siri or Alexa make us rude?

Since childhood, we're conditioned by our parents to speak a certain way and to address others in a certain way. Manners are ingrained in us from the time we learn how to speak. But with the onset of technology and digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, researchers are worried that people might have started to become rude. Wondering how? Well, don't you sort of bark orders at your digital assistant? After all, they are digital, so it isn't like they have feelings.



Researchers were worried that the way we speak to our digital assistants might start to affect the way we speak to other human beings. So, they conducted a study on 241 participants who were asked to interact with their digital assistants. It was then found that thankfully AI digital assistants were not capable of making adults rude.



However, “worried parents and news outlets alike have fretted about how the personification of digital assistants affects our politeness, yet we have found little reason to worry about adults becoming ruder as a result of ordering around Siri or Alexa. In other words, there is no need for adults to say “please” and “thank you” when using a digital assistant,” said James Gaskin, associate professor of information systems at BYU.



While digital assistants aren't advanced enough to make adults change their behaviour, parental concerns have already caused certain assistants to be developed in a way in which they thank and compliment children for making requests politely. The researchers also believe that if we were to have actual robots to do our bidding, things might be different and that human behaviour would be at a higher risk of changing. Stay tuned for more udpates.