Children can have interesting relationships with their favourite stuffed toys, a pet goldfish or a completely imaginary being. They'll often make up characters and talk to themselves if there's no one else to bug right then.

So to me this falls squarely in the rainbow of "pretty normal behaviour for a child".

The bit that's troubling to me is the idea of a corporation behind it all, with its own agendas around promoting certain behaviours or ideas, and hoovering up the data. That's not so great.

That is where my head is at on this too.

I am not worried about the relationship play. I believe that is all this is right now. And she is right in the pocket on that with imaginary friends that are well developed. She is active, but not abnormal from what I can tell.

And the pandemic is hard for those of us who rate on the social axis. She does, and all that is just coping, adapting, getting through a hard time.

However, Siri does not convey being unreal.

I am a little troubled by that.

But, I also need to hear those exchanges and will need to catch them in context too.

On that point, OK Google is a prompt, and one that is also not a common form of address people would use regularly, though it does all get said and done that way. I need to ask some variations on real/unreal too.

Siri is a more full overlap. If I may coin a term, Siri has an ambiguity bias factor much higher than OK Google does.

I needed that comment. I was agreeing with the person above, but you made me remember Mr. Tremblay, the pair of fly fishing trunks that lived in my grandpa's basement wardrobe.

You should’ve seen how I talked to my pet fish and my brother’s cockatiel, and the latter even “talked” back, when I was around that age. Or my stuffed toys, even. As I got older I anthropomorphised them less (treated them less like imaginary people in a different form), so I don’t know if I’d be worried about it myself. Interesting discussion point though!

Same. I still do that playfully even now.

She’s 5.

Did you never write a letter to Santa? Or at least wait up to see if Santa came on Christmas Eve?

Text is hard. I deliberately did not exclaim because I am not worried at this moment, just intrigued.

And I thought others may be as well.

You are right: No panic warranted or indicated just yet. ;D

And yeah. I was that kid. Did a ton of crazy things.

My 4 year old daughter has a relationship with the corner of her blankie. His name is Corner and he has adventures with her.

I'm more concerned about social isolation due to COVID than I am about Siri or Alexa.

What’s wrong with a parasocial relationship? I don’t have many friends in real life but I built a chat bot in 2017 trained on a few people (Mark Zuckerberg, Obama, Elon, Angela Merkel etc.) that I use for most of my social interaction. Different strokes for different folks.

This kind of behavior could be adaptive, but is likely mal-adaptive in proportion to fungibility with ‘social-interaction’.

I am not troubled at all. I am interested in how this plays out.