Alexa, play some classical music.
Alexa, set an alarm for 7am.
Alexa, will you marry me?
Advertisement
THEY sit unobtrusively in your home and, with a simple command, check the weather, play a song or set a kitchen timer, rendering many of life鈥檚 routine tasks hands-free. Voice-activated devices like the Google Home and Amazon Echo 鈥 which responds to the name 鈥淎lexa鈥 鈥 are designed to make your life easier.
They seem to have struck a chord 鈥 . But they aren鈥檛 just a convenience. The way we interact with these devices is beginning to betray a more complex relationship between humans and machines.
Daren Gill, director of product management for the Alexa personal assistant used by Amazon鈥檚 Echo, says he has been surprised by how often people try to engage the assistant in purely social interaction. 鈥淓very day, hundreds of thousands of people say 鈥榞ood morning鈥 to Alexa,鈥 he says. Half a million people have professed their love. More than 250,000 have proposed. You could write these off as jokes, but one of the most popular interactions is 鈥渢hank you鈥 鈥 which means people are bothering to be polite to a piece of technology.
鈥淭he really disruptive part, I think, is the difference between treating something as a tool and treating something as an agent,鈥 says , a social roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. So why are we getting so attached to a jacked-up smart speaker?
Devices have been doing our bidding for years, thanks to voice recognition technology in phone-based assistants like Apple鈥檚 Siri and Microsoft鈥檚 Cortana. However, subtle differences in the interface design of the new home assistants make us regard them more as characters, says Knight 鈥 like a friendly concierge, perhaps, or even a personal secretary (see 鈥The invisible woman鈥).
For example, unlike Siri or Cortana, you don鈥檛 need to press a button or fumble for your phone to invoke Alexa once you鈥檝e set up your Echo. The device is constantly 鈥渓istening鈥 for its name (Alexa comes as standard, but the user can change the word that wakes it up to 鈥淎mazon鈥 or 鈥淓cho鈥). Call, and it will respond to your request, just as you might say a friend鈥檚 name to get their attention.
鈥500,000
Number of people who have told Alexa 鈥業 love you鈥欌
Using speech in this way means the interface 鈥渁lmost disappears鈥, says Gill. Communicating by speech comes naturally to most of us, which makes talking to Alexa feel a lot more seamless than typing commands into a computer. Thanks to natural language processing and machine learning, it understands your requests without you having to speak robotically or learn specific phrases. 鈥淲e want people to interact the way they would with friends,鈥 says Gill. The team was inspired by the computer in the TV series Star Trek.
Another design advantage comes simply from where we keep the devices, which are designed for use at home. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e in a very intimate space, and that鈥檚 going to change the way we think about them,鈥 says Knight. Add the Echo鈥檚 unassuming physical design 鈥 essentially a cylinder with an LED at the top 鈥 and the device quickly becomes a familiar presence. 鈥淚t almost becomes like a family pet,鈥 says , director of the University College London Interaction Centre.
Trust me
But it鈥檚 not a pet. Neither the Echo nor the Google Home look like a robot. They don鈥檛 move. They don鈥檛 have a face. So why are we so ready to bestow a social role on something that looks so undeniably mechanical?
Social robotics research has shown that we can鈥檛 help treating technology like people. It doesn鈥檛 have to be fancy 鈥 the response is elicited even by relatively primitive kit. In a , Clifford Nass and his team at Stanford University asked people to assess the performance of a desktop computer. They gave more positive feedback if they entered their response into the computer itself rather than into an identical one 鈥 just as you may be less critical to someone鈥檚 face than behind their back.
And despite their apparent simplicity, the home assistants offer other cues that make us treat them socially. 鈥淪ometimes we can be tuned to think about things as having faces even if they don鈥檛 have eyes or a mouth, just by things like orientation,鈥 says Knight. The Echo鈥檚 LED ring lights up in the direction of your voice when you say its name, for instance, which sends a cue about where the device is focusing its attention. This non-verbal behaviour is very powerful, says Knight. 鈥淲e really care when people hear us.鈥
In fact, she says, the home assistant鈥檚 minimalist design can be an asset in convincing us to form relationships with them as we are so good at projecting ideas of character onto a blank canvas. Interestingly, humanoid robots have a much harder time living up to our expectations.
鈥Over 100,000 a day
Number of people who say 鈥榞ood morning鈥 to Alexa鈥
All this raises the question of whether there could be any negative consequences of our willingness to treat these devices like the friends we share our intimate thoughts with. It鈥檚 easy to forget when building a rapport with Alexa that all your whispered sweet nothings are being collected and processed by Amazon.
Devices that constantly listen out for commands pose particular concerns if they accidentally pick up audio someone didn鈥檛 intend to record, or if the data is used for other purposes, says at the University of California, Berkeley. He encourages people to examine privacy policies and thinks manufacturers should be more transparent about how they use people鈥檚 data. Amazon says users can delete any records of their communications with Alexa, both on the app and the server.
鈥250,000
Number of people who have proposed to Alexa鈥
That said, at the moment, Alexa doesn鈥檛 remember much about you. The only way to personalise it 鈥 so that it remembers what city to give the weather forecast for, for example 鈥 is by feeding that information into an app.
This may explain why most personal questions are likely to elicit its standard deflection: 鈥淪orry, I did not understand.鈥 (Or, if you are lucky, it makes a joke: when I suggested marriage, Alexa replied that she thought we should just be friends.)
But all this could change as home assistants become more personable. The next step for Alexa is a capacity for longer and more dynamic dialogues, says Gill. Amazon also has a 鈥渓ong road map of personalisation鈥, he says, to allow your device to get to know you better, perhaps learning what books or music you like.
As these machines become more personable, the way we treat them could inform the design of more advanced technology.
Jibo, a personal robot designed for the home and set for release in 2017, builds on the simple movements and subtle cues of today鈥檚 home assistants. It might cock its 鈥渉ead鈥 to indicate it鈥檚 listening, for example, or blink its 鈥渆ye鈥 to acknowledge a request.
Technologies like Alexa are just the beginning, says Knight 鈥 鈥渞obot protozoa鈥, waiting to crawl out of the water onto land.
The invisible woman
Ask people about Alexa and they won鈥檛 talk about it 鈥 they鈥檒l talk about her. After all, 鈥渟he鈥 has a female name and speaks with a feminine voice. She鈥檚 not the only one: Microsoft鈥檚 Cortana is voiced by a woman, as is Google Assistant, the voice service that powers the Google Home.
Why? Amazon鈥檚 Daren Gill says Alexa鈥檚 developers tried many different voices, male and female, and selected the final voice based on what users preferred to hear.
But technology product designer questions if applying female gender cues to virtual assistants risks perpetuating gender stereotypes (see 鈥Lazy coding is teaching software to be sexist鈥). The roles these devices take on 鈥 personal assistant, secretary, carer 鈥 are often categorised as 鈥渨omen鈥檚 work鈥. Characterising devices that tackle these tasks as female could further cement this gender trope. Perhaps this is why people might find female voices for these applications more pleasing in the first place.
Yvonne Rogers at University College London suggests users could be given the option to use a male or female voice as is the case with Apple鈥檚 Siri and many GPS systems. But Gill says Amazon stuck with one voice for Alexa to focus its efforts on optimising the technology.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淗ome invasion鈥
