https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/12/10/16751232/smart-assistants-please-thank-you-politeness-manners-alexa-siri-google-cortana

When you’re asking a digital assistant to do something for you, do you say “please?” How about “thank you?” It’s a question that’s been on my mind for a while, ever since I set up some smart lights in my apartment and started using Siri to turn them on and off. Demanding that my phone turn on and off the lights started feeling weird to say aloud, which got me to wondering: was I being rude to my smartphone?

To be clear, this isn’t some kind of “Be nice to Alexa or the robots will kill you during the inevitable uprising” thing. I know very well that Siri and Cortana are just a bundle of voice recognition software and algorithms, and that they’ll work just as well if I ask them to “Tell me the weather report, please” or just bark out a command for the forecast. And as for saying thank you, given that the speakers have (in theory) shut off from active listening by that point of the query process, it’s unlikely that my Echo can even here me saying it.