Patent on How Personal Voice Assistants May Handle Queries from Kids

Bill Slawski breaks down a newly granted Google patent that sheds some light on how Google Assistant may start to handle queries from Kids. This patent can cover a range of different types of automated assistants but seems to primarily focus upon smart speakers which respond vocally to questions and queries from humans. This patent also tells us that it is geared towards interactions with children and that it may take steps to keep that kind of interaction work well with children.

The focus of assistant devices on vocal interaction makes them especially suitable for use by children. However, many features built into or otherwise accessible using commercially-available automated assistants may not be suitable for children.

• For example, if a child were to ask if the Tooth Fairy were real, a conventional automated assistant may be based on documents located online, reply, “No, the Tooth Fairy is an imaginary character evoked by parents to incentivize children to pull loose teeth.”
• As another example, an automated assistant may be configured to engage with independent agents, such as third party applications, that enable users to order goods/services, such as pizza, movies, toys, etc.–this type of capability could be used by children who may not be able to judge all the consequences of their actions.
• Additionally, conventional automated assistants are designed to interact with people having fully-developed vocabularies. If a user’s input is not sufficiently clear, the automated assistant may request clarification and/or disambiguation, rather than attempt to resolve the user’s request based on a “best guess” as to the user’s intent. Such a long back and forth may cause excessive consumption of various computer and/or network resources (e.g., as a result of generating and rendering the requests for clarification and/or processing the resulting input) and/or maybe frustrating for children with limited vocabularies.

An automated assistant may try to automatically detect a user’s age range by looking at characteristics such as: Cadence, Pitch, Phonemes, Vocabulary, Grammar, Pronunciation, etc.