If you got an Amazon Alexa device for Christmas, you might want to keep a closer eye on the wily kids in your house. Last week, a New Jersey mom caught her son red-handed using the virtual assistant to cheat on his math homework.
Yerelyn Cueva posted a short 11-second clip of her 6-year-old son Jariel asking Alexa to solve the age-old math question, “What’s 5 minus 3?” Cueva told the New York Post they’d only had the Amazon Echo for a week before she caught her son taking the easy way out of his winter break math homework. To be fair, same, Jariel. Same.
While adorable, the video does raise the question of how children growing up with virtual assistants in their homes will interact with these devices. Recently, Google introduced its “Pretty Please” feature, which rewards children for being polite when requesting things from Google Assistant. Though unseen in the video, Cueva told the Post her son thanked Alexa for helping him with his homework. As for homework help, there are plenty of Alexa Skills geared toward helping kids with their schoolwork, and back in June, the ISTE conference for teachers had a session detailing how to use Alexa in the classroom. What I really want to know is: Where was Alexa when I had to do calculus in high school?