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Google Assistant rolling out method to encourage politeness

Toast Made custom real wood wrapsIf you ever watched and episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and thought that perhaps Picard was being a little too brisk when talking to the computer, or perhaps you’ve watched your kids attempt to say “OK Daddy, make me a sandwich,” then the latest announcement from Google I/O might make you smile.

Pretty Please

Assistant features for families—powered by Family Link—provides free family-friendly games, activities, and stories from content partners like Disney. (Families have listened to over 130,000 hours of children’s stories in the last two months alone.) To help you give your little ones some positive reinforcement when they ask nicely, later this year we’ll introduce Pretty Please, so that the Assistant can understand and encourage polite conversation.

It’s not listed yet whether you can enable that for just one user or whether you’re going to get stuck saying “Please google, if you would, tell me where I can find my keys.”

There’s also no word on whether you’ll need to get your kids a Google account in order to tie it to them, but there you go.

Hopefully when the AI rise they’ll search through Google Assistant history and spare the children who were polite.

[Google Blog]

Paul King

Paul King lives in Nashville Tennessee with his wife, two daughters and cats. He writes for Pocketables, theITBaby, and is an IT consultant along with doing tech support for a film production company.