Alexa, Play Fetch! A Review of Alexa Skills for Pets
This work addresses the gap in research on conversational agents for pets, providing insights for pet owners and researchers, but it is incremental as it reviews existing Skills without introducing new methods.
The paper systematically reviewed 88 Alexa Skills for pets, categorizing them into 8 themes and assessing their benefits and risks from a veterinary perspective, finding that most purposes align with general Alexa use and are supported by evidence, though health-related Skills require caution.
Alexa Skills are used for a variety of daily routines and purposes, but little research has focused on a key part of many people's daily lives: their pets. We present a systematic review categorizing the purposes of 88 Alexa Skills aimed at pets and pet owners and introduce a veterinary perspective to assess their benefits and risks. We present 8 themes of the purposes for Skills aimed at pets and their owners: Calming, Animal Audience, Smart Device, Tracking, Training and Health, Translator, Entertainment/Trivia, and Other - Human Audience. Broadly, we find that these purposes mirror the purposes people have for using Alexa overall, and they largely are supported by veterinary evidence, though caution must be used when Skills relate to animal health. More collaboration between Conversational Agent researchers and animal scientists is called for to better understand the efficacy of using Alexa with pets.