Google Assistant wants to teach your kids some manners with Pretty Please

Google Assistant is becoming even more family friendly with a new feature called Pretty Please. The optional prompt was revealed at the Mountain View company’s Google I/O 2018 developer conference and will begin rolling out to Home, and other Assistant-supported devices later this year.

Pretty Please acts in an almost identical manner to Amazon Alexa’s Magic Word functionality by praising young (and old) users for issuing voice commands while also saying “Please”. Once the optional feature is turned on, if Assistant hears the word in a command it will then respond in kind with lines like “thanks for saying please,” or “what a nice way to ask me.”

At the event, vice president of engineering for Google Assistant, Scott Huffman, explained that more and more youngsters with inquisitive young minds are turning to Assistant to ask questions, play games, and listen to stories — the latter of which have been played by families for over 130,000 hours in just the last two months.

This has led to some worry among Googlers and families that kids will forget their Ps and Qs when ordering Assistant around. Instead, Google hopes that positive reinforcement will encourage users to be more polite with its ever-improving digital assistant.

Pretty Please isn’t the only new feature on its way to Assistant in the coming months. Google also announced that six new voices will be added for a bit of variety, as well as, bizarrely, the voice of singer John Legend.

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