Young people give their thoughts on Voice Assisted Technology
As part of their work in the UK Safer Internet Centre Childnet recently launched a piece of research which found that 70% of young people have used voice assisted technology in the last year.
As part of this research, Childnet spoke to their Digital Leaders about their thoughts on voice assisted technology, looking at how they are using it and any top tips they have for their peers.
The Survey:
The survey of over 1,000 children and young people aged 8-17 years conducted by Populus found that 7 in 10 young people are using voice assisted technology, with 92% of those saying they did so to find out information.
Key findings from the survey
- 70% of 8-17s reported using voice assisted technology in the last year, with this being very similar between the 8-12s and 13-17 age ranges.
- 92% of those who had used voice assisted technology reported that they did so primarily to find out information, followed by using it to ask funny questions (90%), play music (73%) and get advice or help (73%).
- On a daily basis 1 in 5 young people (20%) are using voice assisted technology to play music and 8% are using it to get advice or help.
The Digital Leaders give their top tips
We asked the Childnet Digital Leaders for their tops tips for their peers who want to use voice assisted technology. They created the below tips from their own personal experiences of using this technology.
- Tip 1: Be clear and specific
- Tip 2: Stay in control of your information
- Tip 3: Think about where you are when you use it and watch out for it accidentally activating
- Tip 4: Be critical – information online can sometimes be unreliable
- Tip 5: Have fun and stay safe!
The Digital Leaders suggest their improvements
We asked our Digital Leaders how they thought that voice assisted technology could be improved and they mention accuracy, poor voice recognition and slow processing time as obstacles to using voice assisted technology effectively.
They also cited privacy, how information about them could be given away and reliability of information as ways in which voice assisted technology could be improved.