What I discovered when I asked Amazon to tell me everything Alexa had heard

There's some weird anthropomorphization with Alexa and similar voice assistant type devices that seems based less on the data being collected and more on the fact that you're speaking to it instead of typing in queries. This article definitely leans very heavily into that perspective, but doesn't seem to realize it or reflect on why.

As an example, the part of the article about questions his daughter has asked Alexa reflects things no different than ones you might type into a search engine. But he describes it as "Coco’s relationship with Alexa...", a term I'm confident he wouldn't use to describe her typing the same things into Google. You could maybe make the argument that it's different because people ask Alexa things they wouldn't just search for, but that potentially interesting distinction is unexplored by the author.

I'm not aware of anything covering this, but I think there's some interesting potential looking into how humans see technology as more human if they can communicate with it in a human way, regardless of whether or not it otherwise displays aspects of humanity. Generative AI falls into this category too I think. People view it as way more intelligent than it actually is because you can sort of converse with it like a human.