He put in some effort to keep an eye on the child through Alexa but even he knows that his standards fell below what was expected of him as a parent.
Most parents dread the idea of leaving their kids unattended or leaving them alone. However, this 30-year-old man had no problem leaving his 5-year-old daughter with Alexa. No Alexa is not a babysitter, she is Amazon’s virtual assistant device. The man, who has not been named for legal reasons, apparently left his daughter alone and went drinking at the pub on the evening of 13th August last year. Amazon’s cloud-based voice service device might make our modern lifestyle easy in many situations but monitoring a child is certainly not what it’s built for. The court registered that he was supposed to be taking care of his daughter but instead he "went to a string of pubs" in the town.
Authorities arrived at that man’s residence at 2 am the following morning when he reportedly strangled his new girlfriend. The pair were loudly arguing and they had to be separated. The neighbors called the cops after they heard someone screaming from their garden. After the man was arrested from his home in Builth Wells, Powys home, he confessed to attacking his partner and neglecting his young child. The man has also lost custody of his 5-year-old daughter and was given a 12-month jail sentence, suspended for 2 years.
Llandrindod Wells Magistrates Court heard that the police were summoned when he attacked his partner after going out drinking, leaving his daughter all by herself. According to BBC, prosecutor Rebecca Ross revealed that the child was living part-time with her father and part-time with her mother. "They had been drinking vodka and gin with lemonade at home from around 8 pm. The defendant's daughter was in the house but in bed. He wasn't going to go out but he was not chuffed when she (his partner) said she was going out without him, so he went out as well," she added.
Later, the man told the officers that he had grabbed his partner by the throat, told her to shut up, and that she needed to calm down. Defendant Gareth Walters said that “his client would feel the consequences of losing his daughter for a long time.” "He felt he was keeping an eye on his daughter but realized that you can't do that remotely,” Walters said. "There was some effort by him to keep an eye on her but he knows the standards fell below what is expected of a parent."
No matter how advanced technology gets, we can't rely on artificial intelligence or machines to take complete care of our children, at least not for now. And it's certainly not wise to leave young children alone at home and monitor them through apps.
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