Voice Assistants and Smart Speakers in Everyday Life and in Education

• Published in: Informatics in education Vol. 19; no. 3; pp. 473 - 490
• Main Authors: TERZOPOULOS, George, SATRATZEMI, Maya
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Vilnius Vilniaus Universiteto Leidykla 2020; Vilnius University Press; Institute of Mathematics and Informatics; Vilnius University Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Lithuanian Academy of Sciences; Vilnius University
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Assistive Technology; Cloud computing; Education; Educational Objectives; Educational technology; Elementary Education; Elementary Secondary Education; Households; ICT Information and Communications Technologies; Influence of Technology; Informatics; Information Science; Information Security; Internet of Things; Interpersonal Competence; Language Processing; Lifelong Learning; Music; Natural Language Processing; Older people; Privacy; Reference Materials; Scientific Research; Second Language Learning; smart speakers; Smartphones; Special Education; Technology Uses in Education; voice assistants; Voice communication; smart speakers; education; artificial intelligence; voice assistants
• ISSN: 1648-5831; 2335-8971
• DOI: 10.15388/infedu.2020.21

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shown significant progress and its potential is growing. An application area of AI is Natural Language Processing (NLP). Voice assistants incorporate AI by using cloud computing and can communicate with the users in natural language. Voice assistants are easy to use and thus there are millions of devices that incorporates them in households nowadays. Most common devices with voice assistants are smart speakers and they have just started to be used in schools and universities. The purpose of this paper is to study how voice assistants and smart speakers are used in everyday life and whether there is potential in order for them to be used for educational purposes.