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 
I chose option 4 of Alexa’s new voice yesterday. Lol She turns my lights on too!
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Handiest housemate I ever had, lol! (The tidiest, too…)
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It’s such an entertaining service!!!
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Yes, it’s cool, but I still find it really creepy.
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Alexa turns on my disposal in my tiny California house. (Don’t ask.) However, in order to turn it off, I must shout above the noise of the disposal. I can only imagine what the neighbors think.
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That made me giggle!
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First of all, 1985 could not have been 40 years ago, LOL. The 80s will forever be only 20 years ago. I say this as someone who was a sophomore in high school in 1985.
Never tried Alexa, just not into it. I would be ok with just the answers, but I don’t need her trying to have a conversation. Hahahaha. It’s just a little creepy to me.
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I HAVE heard horrifying stories of Alexa sending a text or message to someone who was being talked ABOUT… I don’t know if any of those are true, or if they’re apocryphal—but yes, I can understand being creeped out by an eavesdropper. ;)
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oh snap….no thanks
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Kana
I’ve grown up in the military with all kinds of new technology. The first computer that I ‘worked’ on was back in 1977 when I was at the Army Command and General Staff College. We were the guineapigs on the first computerized War Game, “Operation Jayhawk”. We had a large 8′ x 8′ table map that was divided into numbered and lettered squares. The ‘Red’ army was on one side, and the ‘Green’ army (US) was on the other side. Our team would have to devise our first move and feed the information on what unit was going to move, to which box it was going to move to and at what time it would make its move.
A technician would keypunch the information onto a punch card and then feed it into the computer. The computer would counter our move with a ‘Red ‘move that was supposed to mimic standard USSR tactical responses to our moves. Casualties would be estimated and we would prepare for the next move.
I’m going to try to explain some military jargon here, FEBA = Forward Edge of the Battle Area. This was the Frontlines where you would expect any initial action to take place. There was sorta of a ‘no-man’s’ land between the opposing forces. So, we’ve got our forces set up where we anticipated the FEBA to be – they gave us the wrong coordinates. We were set up at the LoC = Line of Contact (where the battle would first take place), rather than along the FEBA [I hope I haven’t lost you yet! LOL]
According to the Old Soviet Doctrine they would make the first move, a massive artillery strike. When the computer fired the ‘Red’ artillery it hit absolutely nothing. Of course our next move is what is called Counter-battery artillery response = Our artillery fires back at their artillery. Because the ‘Red’s’ hadn’t hit any of our artillery our second move was to totally destroy their artillery – which we did.
Three moves later we totally destroyed the entire ‘Red’ Army and sent it reeling back across the battlefield. We ended up with an astonishingly quick victory, what was supposed to take us all day was done in four moves. It wasn’t until they reviewed the data input that they found the initial glitch. All done with key punch cards!
When I was stationed in Indianapolis we worked on the first “computer” that the Army purchased. It was a “WANG” system. The drive unit used two 8” floppy disks. One held the WANG operating system and the other 8” floppy disks was our data storage. Each disk stored a whopping 8K of memory!
From there we matriculated to the ZENITH 386. I was serving as the Comptroller for our command when they automated our office. My accountants had no issues except that the old Z386s were junk and our IT guy went nuts constantly repairing them. I had one accountant, Marsha; her system never broke down. Our IT guy came to me and asked why Marsha had a 2-lb sludge hammer on top of her computer. We went in and asked her, she responded “I just want this piece of junk to know who’s really in charge!”
When I went to the US Army War College we had to purchase our first home computer an EPSON 8086. It had a whopping 30K of memory! But it worked well into the 1990s.
When I was serving as the Senior Army Operations officer at the old US Atlantic Command in Norfolk Virginia I got my first ‘lap top’, It weighed a ton and it took two carrying cases to operate the system. One carrying case contained the keyboard and the fold up monitor. The second bag carried the ‘hard drive’ unit. Due to the sensitive classified nature of that unit it had to be locked in a safe when not in use. It was portable, but nothing like we use today. The only time that we actually used the portable computer was when we moved the War Room onto the USS Mount Whitney which was the command ship for the command. Other than that it stayed locked up in the safe in the war room.
I cut my teeth on DOS, never really worked with Apple, although I wrote the US Army’s first automated training program on an Apple while I was assigned to Fort McCoy, WI. It was a simple program on how to organize military correspondence. You would read the text and then answer a question – right answer Ta-Da! Wrong answer ZZZk! If you got the right answer it would take you to the next screen, wrong answer took you back to the previous screen!
Today I marvel at what our computers can do. I marveled at the size, portability, and to a great degree their survivability. So I’m not really afraid of AI. It’ll be another tool in our toolbox, one that I think most of us will learn how to use and appreciate at some point in time. Having grown up with computers I’ve seen the fear that a lot of people had in the early days. My 100 year old mother-in-law actually left her job at the library when they tried to automate. She was terrified of computers and could not even imagine using one. Now she uses mine to play card games. I do all of my writing on the computer, I dictate on the computer, I edit on the computer, I don’t know what I would do without it. It’s become a part of our daily lives.
We’ll have our initial fits and gripes about AI but we’ll work through it like we’ve worked through all the other computer systems.
Regards “Hardcharger” website: ptaylorvietnamadvisor.com
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I’m in sympathy with Marsha—sometimes the sledgehammer feels like the most appealing solution to a technology problem… ;) That battle game sounds like a higher-tech version of Risk. I used to play Risk with my dad—the game could go on for DAYS!
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What a lovely read thank you. We don’t have Alexa but my daughter does and Alexa doesn’t want to cooperate with my daughter only my son in-law. One time we were house sitting for them and I was discussing whether Alexa listened to our conversation and Alexa interjected out of nowhere ‘would you like to order pizza tonight, I will put it on ‘son in law’s ‘ account. I started panicking. Anyway it was quite funny.😄😂
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Oh goodness! Apparently you have your answer about whether she eavesdrops. ;)
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Yes 😂😅
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Sadly, it’s not the sky we have to worry about. I’ve been watching the “AI” bubble quite closely, because a lot of the authors I follow were affected directly when their work got stolen to “train” the Large Language Models that are masquerading as AI. So, a product based on theft is a bad beginning, but when you add in that those searches you’re asking Alexa to do are becoming less and less reliable because what they’re searching is increasingly “AI” generated slop, and the environmental cost of the data centres to support these “advances” guzzling the groundwater and demanding outrageous amounts of electricity – well, we won’t notice the sky falling.
I love the idea of a personal assistant like Alexa or Cortana. But if she was there for YOUR benefit, you would have the option to call her anything you liked. Alexa’s an Amazon employee. It’s great that you get some joy and utility from her, and I wouldn’t take that away from you. But her job is to listen and report back for the benefit of Amazon.
The authors I follow won’t get decent recompense for the work that was stolen. No one is going to step in and stop the datacentres taking water and power from regular citizens. The best we can hope for right now is the collapse of the AI bubble making it financially unviable to continue down this road, but the knock on effect to national economies will be harsh. Sorry to be so grim after such a lovely post, but this is a bugbear of mine!
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I see that it is! :)
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I have heard of Alexa but I don’t use anything like it
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interesting times indeed. I don’t use Alexa, but enjoy using AI to ask whatever question pops into my head
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me too!
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