Talking to devices
13/04/16 05:20
I don’t have the latest model, but I use an iPhone for my mobile communications and a variety of other applications. Like many other iPhone users, I have played with the phone quite a bit and made a few changes to personalize it to my liking. I use the voice activated commands with this phone more than I did with previous phones. Perhaps the user interface is more intuitive, or perhaps I’m just using the technology a lot more than once was the case. One of the features I use is the digital assistant that Apple calls Siri. I use to to look up addresses in my address book, to get the phone to give me navigation instructions, to look up some items on the Internet and to dictate text messages. Since the phone uses a digitally generated voice to answer some of the questions, I decided to change the factory default.
We have a GPS device for the car and when we visited England a few years ago, I downloaded the maps of England and that somehow set the voice of the device to British English, an accent that I found much more soothing than the default accent in the device. I renamed the device “Hyacinth” and have been using the British voice ever since.
The English accent in my iPhone somehow reminds me of HAL 9000, the computer character in Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey series. HAL stands for Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer. The H comes from Heuristically. The A and L come from Algorithmic. I know it is kind of corny, but I didn’t write the books. In the movie the character has a male voice that is slightly altered to sound a bit like people thought computer generated speech might sound like back when the movie was made. Siri is a generic female voice that is a bit more human sounding. Interestingly, Siri is genuinely a computer generated voice. HAL, on the other hand, is a fictional character - that of a machine - played by a human actor. Anyway, I didn’t like the English Siri.
I really wanted a Canadian Siri, but frankly, she simply doesn’t pronounce “about” the way a Canadian does and so I rejected that accent.
For now I’ve settled on the Australian accent, which I’m pretty sure wouldn’t sound very Australian to a person from that continent, but is foreign enough to be a bit exotic for me.
Frankly, I still feel self conscious and a bit silly talking to my phone. I tend not to use the voice activated features when there are other people around. I’m going to have to get used to that. Speech recognition and voice activation of computing devices is already with us, works very well, and will increase.
The algorithms of the amazon.com web site periodically try to sell me their “smart home device” called Echo. The system remembers that I have previously looked at, but not purchased, light switches and heating controls that can be activated with the use of a smart phone. The Echo devise plays music from several Internet sources, acts as a voice activated digital assistant to look up recipes, answer questions, read audiobooks, read the news, remember schedules. It also will turn on and off lights, turn up or down the heat, order a ride from Uber or a pizza from Domino’s. The service is called Alexa Voice Service (so I guess the device’s name is probably Alexa instead of Echo). Anyway, every time I look at the advertisement for the device on the Amazon web site, it sort of creeps me out. The thought of having a devise that is always turned on and constantly sending amazon information on what I read, what I cook, my schedule, and even when I turn out the lights to go to bed is not exactly the kind of surveillance I want in my home. As these devices become more and more common, I’m sure that I won’t be an early adopter. It might just be a bit like television - a device that a lot of people use that I just don’t seem to like very much and so the set remains turned off for days at a time.
Electronic assistants are coming. Some people call them bots, which is a shortened form of robots.
Facebook, another service I use, but not nearly as much as many of my peers, announced yesterday that they will soon be releasing bots that work in conjunction with the Facebook messenger service. They will be able to take commands such as instructions to transfer money between bank accounts, pay bills, and other online bank functions. Facebook promises that they will also initiate conversation, asking something like, “Do you want to hear today’s top news stories?”
OK that one creeps me out, too. First of all, I don’t like the idea of an algorithm deciding which news is most important. Secondly, I don’t like a device telling me when to look at or listen to the news. Thirdly, my phone interrupts my conversations and focused thinking way too much as it is. I don’t need more interruptions. Despite the claims made at the Facebook developers conference, I don’t think that any conversation with an electronic device will be “natural.” At least it won’t seem natural to me.
All of these digital assists come with costs that may not be apparent at the outset. In addition to the cost of the devise and the ongoing costs of data services and some of the applications, the big cost of these services is the privacy that you give up. The devices are constantly sending data to marketers who are customizing their pitches to you. That’s how Amazon got me to read the advertisement for their device. Increasingly they are expanding the amount of information that is used. If you use a digital assistant for online banking, for example, how much money you spend is entered into the formula.
Having all of those fears about the devices, however, I know that I will use some of them. There is no way to measure the joy of being able to read bedtime stories to our grandson last night over Skype. That’s what I like best: when the device allows me to converse with my loved ones and I am able to forget about the device. If I feel a need to talk to someone when my family is not available, I can always talk to myself.
We have a GPS device for the car and when we visited England a few years ago, I downloaded the maps of England and that somehow set the voice of the device to British English, an accent that I found much more soothing than the default accent in the device. I renamed the device “Hyacinth” and have been using the British voice ever since.
The English accent in my iPhone somehow reminds me of HAL 9000, the computer character in Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey series. HAL stands for Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer. The H comes from Heuristically. The A and L come from Algorithmic. I know it is kind of corny, but I didn’t write the books. In the movie the character has a male voice that is slightly altered to sound a bit like people thought computer generated speech might sound like back when the movie was made. Siri is a generic female voice that is a bit more human sounding. Interestingly, Siri is genuinely a computer generated voice. HAL, on the other hand, is a fictional character - that of a machine - played by a human actor. Anyway, I didn’t like the English Siri.
I really wanted a Canadian Siri, but frankly, she simply doesn’t pronounce “about” the way a Canadian does and so I rejected that accent.
For now I’ve settled on the Australian accent, which I’m pretty sure wouldn’t sound very Australian to a person from that continent, but is foreign enough to be a bit exotic for me.
Frankly, I still feel self conscious and a bit silly talking to my phone. I tend not to use the voice activated features when there are other people around. I’m going to have to get used to that. Speech recognition and voice activation of computing devices is already with us, works very well, and will increase.
The algorithms of the amazon.com web site periodically try to sell me their “smart home device” called Echo. The system remembers that I have previously looked at, but not purchased, light switches and heating controls that can be activated with the use of a smart phone. The Echo devise plays music from several Internet sources, acts as a voice activated digital assistant to look up recipes, answer questions, read audiobooks, read the news, remember schedules. It also will turn on and off lights, turn up or down the heat, order a ride from Uber or a pizza from Domino’s. The service is called Alexa Voice Service (so I guess the device’s name is probably Alexa instead of Echo). Anyway, every time I look at the advertisement for the device on the Amazon web site, it sort of creeps me out. The thought of having a devise that is always turned on and constantly sending amazon information on what I read, what I cook, my schedule, and even when I turn out the lights to go to bed is not exactly the kind of surveillance I want in my home. As these devices become more and more common, I’m sure that I won’t be an early adopter. It might just be a bit like television - a device that a lot of people use that I just don’t seem to like very much and so the set remains turned off for days at a time.
Electronic assistants are coming. Some people call them bots, which is a shortened form of robots.
Facebook, another service I use, but not nearly as much as many of my peers, announced yesterday that they will soon be releasing bots that work in conjunction with the Facebook messenger service. They will be able to take commands such as instructions to transfer money between bank accounts, pay bills, and other online bank functions. Facebook promises that they will also initiate conversation, asking something like, “Do you want to hear today’s top news stories?”
OK that one creeps me out, too. First of all, I don’t like the idea of an algorithm deciding which news is most important. Secondly, I don’t like a device telling me when to look at or listen to the news. Thirdly, my phone interrupts my conversations and focused thinking way too much as it is. I don’t need more interruptions. Despite the claims made at the Facebook developers conference, I don’t think that any conversation with an electronic device will be “natural.” At least it won’t seem natural to me.
All of these digital assists come with costs that may not be apparent at the outset. In addition to the cost of the devise and the ongoing costs of data services and some of the applications, the big cost of these services is the privacy that you give up. The devices are constantly sending data to marketers who are customizing their pitches to you. That’s how Amazon got me to read the advertisement for their device. Increasingly they are expanding the amount of information that is used. If you use a digital assistant for online banking, for example, how much money you spend is entered into the formula.
Having all of those fears about the devices, however, I know that I will use some of them. There is no way to measure the joy of being able to read bedtime stories to our grandson last night over Skype. That’s what I like best: when the device allows me to converse with my loved ones and I am able to forget about the device. If I feel a need to talk to someone when my family is not available, I can always talk to myself.