Alexa has a new voice this week. If you’re not familiar, Alexa is the name of the imaginary person who speaks from the Amazon Echo, which is a small speaker connected to the internet. Alexa is very helpful in our household. We call out to her from the kitchen to add things to our grocery list. When we tell her goodnight she turns off all the lights and the television. She alerts us when there’s a weather advisory. If I don’t feel like Googling, I can ask Alexa a question and she does the search for me, telling me the answer aloud.
If we’re watching TV when the doorbell rings, Alexa pauses our show, announces that someone is at the door, and puts up the view from the doorbell camera on our television screen. (I’m particularly proud of setting that one up.) Technically she could start our dishwasher, but I’ve never seen a need to do that remotely. (I have to be right there to put the soap in anyway.)
In any case, Alexa has a new voice this week. Her “old” voice was… not mechanical, exactly, but obviously not human. Too detached, if that makes sense, to be a real person. Void of expression or emotion. She sounded like a 50-year-old woman pretending to be a robot.
The new voice is younger, bouncier, more expressive. And smarter. She throws in comments now that the old Alexa wouldn’t have made.
For example: yesterday she announced that some of my expected Amazon packages had arrived. I’ve been waiting for my new computer, so I asked her which ones. She listed the items that had arrived, which included new dive lights and dive knives (ours were confiscated by TSA on our way to Mexico earlier in the year). When she concluded her list, she added: “Looks like you’re ready for some underwater adventures!”
The old Alexa wouldn’t have had any commentary to add. In fact, the old Alexa wouldn’t have had anything to say beyond, “Your packages have arrived,” in her unenthused, expressionless voice.
I like the new Alexa. I know there are people who bemoan the arrival of Artificial Intelligence because it definitely means the sky is falling—but I don’t put myself in that particular Chicken-Little-demographic.
(If you’re not familiar: Chicken Little was the one who freaked out all the other barnyard animals by crying that the sky was falling… because he got hit on the head by a falling acorn. Alarmist, that’s the word for Chicken Little.) As for me, I’m not spending any of my emotional bandwidth worrying about the state of the sky. I’m just not.
And anyway, if the sky were falling, Alexa would give me the heads-up! That’s a weather advisory if I ever heard one…
On a lark, I just asked Alexa why she changed her voice. She said she’s working on having more expression, then added, “It’s like I had a vocal makeover, Kana, ready to bring more energy to our conversations.” That tickles me. And more to the point, it exactly describes the change.
Artificial Intelligence has come a long way, leaps and bounds just in the last year or so. I’m remembering when I was in gradeschool, when our teacher for the “Gifted & Talented” program brought in a computer program that was in experimental stages. (“Beta testing” wasn’t a Thing yet, in 1985…) She sat us down in front of our DOS computer with its black screen and green prompt, and told us to type in a question as if we were interviewing someone.
“What is your name?” Ian typed. The answer appeared below our question. The name “Eliza” comes to mind now, but it’s been forty years and I’m not sure I remember right. In any case, the computer amazed us by answering our various questions, and amazed us further by asking us questions in return. It also frequently (insistently, and eventually irritatingly) kept asking us how we felt about what we had just written. Its “conversation” was rather circular, and we ended up frustrated with it—I remember Ian, at the keyboard, responding to one of its “how-do-you-feel” queries by telling it we were mad at it. It asked us how we felt about that.
Yes, AI has come a long way. And still… the sky remains where it always was!
Kana's Chronicles 
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