One of the unexpected pleasures of modern parenthood is eavesdropping on your ten-year-old as she conducts existential conversations with an iPhone. “Who are you, Siri?” “What is the meaning of life?” Pride becomes bemusement, though, as the questions degenerate into abuse. “Siri, you’re stupid!” Siri’s unruffled response—“I’m sorry you feel that way”—provokes “Siri, you’re fired!”

I don’t think of my daughter as petulant. Friends tell me they’ve watched their children go through the same love, then hate, for digital personal assistants. Siri’s repertoire of bon mots is limited, and she can be slow to understand seemingly straightforward commands, such as, “Send e-mail to Hannah.” (“Uh oh, something’s gone wrong.”) Worse, from a child’s point of view, she rebuffs stabs at intimacy: Ask her if she loves you, and after deflecting the question a few times (“Awk-ward,” “Do I what?”) she admits: “I’m not capable of love.” Earlier this year, a mother wrote to Philip Galanes, the “Social Q’s” columnist for The New York Times, asking him what to do when her ten-year-old son called Siri a “stupid idiot.” Stop him, said Galanes; the vituperation of virtual pals amounts to a “dry run” for hurling insults at people. His answer struck me as clueless: Children yell at toys all the time, whether talking or dumb. It’s how they work through their aggression.

Siri will get smarter, though, and more companionable, because conversational agents are almost certain to become the user interface of the future. They’re already close to ubiquitous. Google has had its own digital personal assistant, Google Voice Search, since 2008. Siri will soon be available in Ford, Toyota, and General Motors cars. As this magazine goes to press, Microsoft is unveiling its own version of Siri, code-named Cortana (the brilliant, babelicious hologram in Microsoft’s Halo video game). Voice activation is the easiest method of controlling the smart devices—refrigerators, toilets, lights, elevators, robotic servants—that will soon populate our environment. All the more reason, then, to understand why children can’t stop trying to make friends with these voices. Think of our children as less inhibited avatars of ourselves. It is through them that we’ll learn what it will be like to live in a world crowded with “friends” like Siri.

The wonderment is that Siri has any emotional pull at all, given her many limitations. Some of her appeal can be chalked up to novelty. But she has another, more fundamental attraction: her voice. Voice is a more visceral medium than text. A child first comes to know his mother through her voice, which he recognizes as distinctively hers while still in the womb. Moreover, the disembodied voice unleashes fantasies and projections that the embodied voice somehow keeps in check. That’s why Freud sat psychoanalysts behind their patients. It’s also why phone sex can be so intense.

The literary critic Ruth Franklin, whose children were also entranced by, then peeved at, Siri, suggested to me that maybe kids get mad at her because she fails to meet “the maternal expectations they associate with women.” That sounds right, although, of course, adults have these expectations, too. The current generation of iPhones allows you to set Siri to male as well as female, but the point is that voices communicate gender, age, authority or the lack thereof—primal social cues that we can’t help but process as markers of a real personality.