Parents, your child may have a new secret friend: your smart speaker.

Drawn by the devices’ voice-activated interfaces and warm, playful tone, children as young as 1 are interacting with Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant or Apple ’s Siri long before they can type or swipe, new research shows.

This is new territory for families. For the first time, children who are too young to distinguish fantasy from reality are engaging with devices powered by artificial intelligence. Many see smart speakers as magical, imbue them with human traits and boss them around like a Marine drill instructor, according to several new studies in the past year.