Yelling at robots means that the future, finally, is here.
We live in the future.
I am convinced of this because of something I did on Tuesday of last week. I came home from work and said out loud:
“Alexa, order a drone.”
Tuesday was Prime Day, Amazon’s one-day shopping event which this year, included special deals that could only be ordered with your Amazon Echo. Including a toy drone/quadcopter, which admittedly I didn’t really need, but was on sale for $25, plus an additional $10 off for ordering with Alexa, , making the cost of the experiment just $15 bones.
This was my first voice purchase, although we’ve been living with an Amazon Echo for over a year now. Interacting with it has been more or less delightful, so much so that I’ve noticed a distinct preference for Alexa (the name of our Echo’s disembodied voice) to all of the other AI I in my life, like Siri, Cortana or OK Google. It made me wonder if Amazon had somehow cracked voice recognition in ways the others hadn’t?
The answer, I suspect, is no. Instead, Alexa has a more specific agreement with me that Siri and her pals lack. The terms of our relationship are well spelled out: I can ask her about the weather, the news, my schedule and to play music and podcasts and order me the occasional drone, but beyond this, we have little to discuss. In some ways, Alexa is like running into an old friend from high school and realizing that beyond high school stuff, you just don’t have much to talk about.
Siri and her pals, on the other hand, promise a much, much wider range of topics to talk about, but in doing so, open themselves up for more misunderstandings. Have you ever rolled your eyes when, in response to what seemed to be a simple question, Siri asks if she should search the web?
I have, because in Siri, unlike Alexa, I expect more understanding and articulate responses — something closer to what I saw on the Jetsons growing up, or Michael Knight talking to KITT on Knight Rider, or any of the legion sci-fi productions of the past 40 years (2001, TNG, etc.).
And this is because the agreement I have with Siri is much larger in scope. From her launch (2011), Apple set the terms of this arrangement with those commercials of actor John Malkovich engaged in deeply philosophical inquiries with Siri. And who among us hasn’t asked Siri a range of philosophical questions just to see what she has to say? The ads have implicitly created a broad-scale agreement between us and Siri that suggests that no topics are off limits.
With Alexa, though, I rarely venture outside of our go-to topics, and so my experience is more consistent and reliable. Amazon emails me every week to tell me about a few new things Alexa and I can talk about, and sometimes these get added to my mix. Ordering a drone was a quirky one-off. Others are less successful. For example, Alexa will tell me a joke whenever I ask, but as you might suspect, her timing is terrible:
We also talk to the TV in our house, or more specifically to our Xbox, which manages all of our living room entertainment. We do this via the Kinect sensor, which is always listening (though I hope — rousing games of Kinect NatGeoTV aside — not always watching). When you’re watching a film or a show and have to get up for a bio break or a snack, it is crazy convenient to simply say Xbox, Pause instead of hunting around for the always elusive controller.
Unfortunately, our Xbox only seems to obey my voice. Like a privileged 1950s patriarch, the Xbox blissfully ignores the higher-pitched pleas of my wife and kiddos. This only infuriates them, and often results in all three simultaneously shouting versions of XBox, Pause! at different pitches and intensities until, like the dawn of the 1970s, Xbox puts down the paper and dirty martini, cinches the knot in its smoking jacket and pauses the damn movie.
This may not be the greatest experience for my family, but it is still a much better agreement than I have with our first generation Roomba, who struggled mightily for years to keep the kitchen floor swept of the detritus tracked into our house by three dogs, a cat and two kiddos.
To be 100% clear, our Roomba is not built with any voice interface, and is not intended to interact with me in any way other than turning around if it bumps into me while it’s doing its job. I replaced the battery not long ago and set it to work as I left the house. I returned home a few hours later to find it pooped out in the middle of the half-swept floor.
“What’s the matter with you?” I shouted. “That’s a brand new battery!”
That was the first moment in my life when I realized that shouting at robots was going to be a thing. And that meant I was finally living in the future.
I also realized that Roomba and I have a very limited agreement, decidedly non-verbal, that covers only the job that it has to do, and certainly does not include how thorough or swift it must be, or whether or not it is acceptable to stop working altogether halfway through the job and wander off to take a nap. But in this way, Roomba helped prepare me for what life is like now that my kids are teenagers.
I anticipate that the extent to which we speak to our devices and machines will only increase over time. I’m using only my voice to edit a first draft of this post in Google Docs, for example.
The experience is adequate, in case you’re wondering, but the people in adjoining cubicles are not huge fans.
Did you know? You can ask Alexa to play the Mindset Digital podcast on TuneIn. Just say “Alexa…play the Mindset Digital podcast.” Your kids will not be impressed.
