If you don’t have a smart speaker in your home now, there’s a high chance you will soon. In the United States alone, penetration rose from 0.5% of households in 2014 to 60% in 2022. But won’t someone think of the children?

In an opinion piece published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood journal last year, academics posited that voice-controlled smart devices could have “long-term consequences on empathy, compassion and critical thinking among children,” in part because AI assistants don’t require children to ask politely for what they want. No one wants a generation of tyrants who are rude to those who are close to them (and even worse to those who aren’t), and tech firms have already taken note. In 2018, Google updated its Assistant with a “Pretty Please” mode th...