Voice assistant technology continues to underperform on children's speech

Abstract

Voice assistant (VA) technology is increasingly part of children's everyday lives. But how well do these systems understand children? No study has asked this with children under 5 years old. Here, two versions of Siri, and one of Alexa, were tested on their ability to transcribe utterances produced by 2-, 3-, and 5-year-olds. Human listeners (mothers and undergraduates) were also tested. Results showed that while Siri's performance on children's speech has improved in recent years, even the newest Siri and Alexa models struggle with children's speech. Human listeners far outperformed VA systems with all ages, especially with the youngest children's speech.