Plenty of people do. There’s no need. Alexa has no feelings to spare, and it won’t work any better for the courtesy. So if you catch yourself saying please and thank you to a speaker on the kitchen counter, it’s worth asking who the manners are actually for.
They’re for you. You’re keeping a habit of respect alive so that it’s there, without thinking, when it’s a person in front of you rather than a machine. Same with indicating on an empty road at midnight. Nobody benefits. You’re keeping the behaviour in place for the day someone is sitting in your blind spot, where you won’t have time to decide.
That small instinct says something useful about trust.
The behaviours that strengthen someone’s confidence in you — being clear, following through, being fair, saying so early when you can’t deliver — are easy enough on a calm Tuesday. But trust is rarely tested on calm Tuesdays. It gets tested when you’re busy, stressed, behind, or caught off guard. And in exactly those moments we stop deciding carefully and fall back on habit, mood and convenience.
If being clear or fair is something you have to choose each time, weighing it up fresh, you’ll be inconsistent precisely when it matters most. Not because you don’t hold the value. Because you didn’t have the spare attention to apply it.
This is where people get nervous about practising behaviour. It sounds like learning a script. Going through the motions. Faking it. That’s not the aim, and faking it doesn’t work anyway; people feel the difference between a real question and a performed one almost instantly. The aim is the opposite. You practise a behaviour enough that it stops costing you effort, so it’s still there when your effort is spent elsewhere. You stop asking whether this situation is serious enough to be fair, and simply behave to the standard you’ve chosen, including the times you’re not really thinking about it.
There’s a knock-on effect too. Once you’ve deliberately turned your attention to a behaviour, you start noticing it, in yourself and in how people respond to you. It’s the same reason you suddenly see a particular car everywhere the week you decide to buy one. Nothing changed out in the world. Your attention did.
So whether you thank a smart speaker doesn’t matter. What it reveals does. The behaviours you want available when it counts are the ones you keep alive when it doesn’t. In a difficult moment, you’re more likely to fall back on what you’ve practised — and the empty road at midnight is where that gets decided.