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Toys that Listen: A Study of Parents, Children, and Internet-Connected Toys

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Hello Barbie, CogniToys Dino, and Amazon Echo are part of a new wave of connected toys and gadgets for the home that listen. Unlike the smartphone, these devices are always on, blending into the background until needed. We conducted interviews with parent-child pairs in which they interacted with Hello Barbie and CogniToys Dino, shedding light on children's expectations of the toys' "intelligence'" and parents' privacy concerns and expectations for parental controls. We find that children were often unaware that others might be able to hear what was said to the toy, and that some parents draw connections between the toys and similar tools not intended as toys (e.g., Siri, Alexa) with which their children already interact. Our findings illuminate people's mental models and experiences with these emerging technologies and will help inform the future designs of interactive, connected toys and gadgets. We conclude with recommendations for parents, designers, and policy makers.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2017
7138 pages
ISBN:9781450346559
DOI:10.1145/3025453
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 02 May 2017

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Author Tags

  1. children
  2. connected toys
  3. parents
  4. privacy

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  • Rose Foundation for Communities and the Environment

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CHI '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 600 of 2,400 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)Parenting in the Age of Artificial IntelligenceExploring Youth Studies in the Age of AI10.4018/979-8-3693-3350-1.ch003(45-68)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
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