Alexa, Play Fetch! A Review of Alexa Skills for Pets

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews Alexa Skills for pets, categorizing their purposes, assessing their benefits and risks from a veterinary perspective, and highlighting the need for collaboration between AI researchers and animal scientists.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive categorization and veterinary assessment of Alexa Skills aimed at pets, emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Findings

Skills mirror human Alexa use purposes

Most Skills are supported by veterinary evidence

Caution is needed for health-related Skills

Abstract

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.