Using Voice Technology as a Medium for Kids

Steve Adubato goes One-on-One with Adva Levin, Founder of Pretzel Labs, from the Amazon Alexa VOICE Summit at NJIT, to discuss how voice technology is a great technology medium for kids.

9/26/18 #2168

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"Welcome to Kids Court. Where everything unfair is finally brought to justice. [gavel raps three times] All rise for the Honorable Judge Lexy. Do you want to settle a case? Or hear about previous trials? Settle a case. Prosecutor, please tell the Court what happened? Ellen read my diary. Kids Court was created for cases like this. Is the defendant present? Or absent? Present. Defendant, you're in trouble. What do you plead? Say "guilty" if you did it. Or "not guilty" if you didn't. Not guilty. Check out all this activity behind me. We're at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. This is the Voice Summit, sponsored by Amazon Alexa. Right here is a young lady who understands kids, she understands disputes, she understands technology, and how voice technology can help determine who's right and who's wrong, and settle disputes, and she is Adva Levin, who is Founder of Pretzel Labs, which is? Pretzel Labs is a game design company that creates voice interactions for kids. Okay. How did you get into this whole thing? Ah. That's a good question. I got an Alexa, and I actually thought of it like it was a person, and I started thinking, "What can we achieve, like, as a family, or in schools, if we had this extra person in the house that is objective, it's a computer, and it can sort of be you know, like whatever we tell it to be, and how would we use an extra person in the house?" So... Is that where...? By the way, you know this tech... some of the technology you have at home? We ask Alexa all kinds of things, right? Yeah. But this is Judge Lexy? Who is Judge Lexy? Judge Lexy is an Alexa based judge that settles kids' fights. So if your kids are fighting over something, you can just send them... Okay. ...to Kids Court, which is the name of the app. I'm sorry. Kids Court? Kids Court. Yeah. [laughter] So okay. You get them together? Yeah. I have a 14 and a 15 year old... we have a 14 and a 15 year old who fight over all kinds of things. Who thinks that one stole the baseball bat in the other one's room. Who's taller? But that's not... it's got to be a real dispute? When it comes to kids, is it a game for kids? It's a game. It's not meant to be... to make, like, real decisions about who's guilty... It's not an arbiter of truth? ...or not. Not at all. And accuracy? The whole thing is... it's meant to teach them about the legal system. So it, like, introduces the terms of a prosecutor, a defendant, witnesses, evidence, and it takes them through..."