They hear you when you're sleeping, and they know when you're awake.

They know when

you've been bad or good so…

Be good to your digital assistant, for goodness sake.

If you are hoping Santa will bring you a smart speaker this Christmas, before you
unbox it and start firing off your burning questions, consider this:

Research shows as much as half of all human-computer interactions are abusive — we

swear at them, call them names and ask them crude questions.

In fact, US researcher Sheryl Brahnam wrote back in 2005 that even the earliest
digital assistants brought out "the dark side of human behaviour".

So why do we do it? Does it really matter? And what does it say about humans? Let's
take a look.

Why do we swear at chatbots and digital assistants?

According to Fraser Allison, a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne who is
studying the way we speak to AI characters, the most common reasons are because:

We're frustrated (OK, we've all been here)

We're experimenting (We're interested in seeing just how far we can push the
boundaries)
We're in the mood for a bit of fun (Because the normal