Alexa, Siri... Elsa? Children drive boom in smart speakers

Voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri will become common in children's bedrooms, according to a new report from Internet Matters, the online safety body, which says it is critical for parents to spend more time understanding new technology. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of new technology at home by "three or four years", the researchers said, and families in the UK will become much more reliant on voice-enabled devices over the next five years. The report's author, Lynne Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Sunderland, said we would even see the emergence of a range of celebrity voice assistants. "You'd have Elsa from Frozen," Hall said. "You can imagine that with every Disney film that came out there would be a new voice skin."