ABSTRACT
During the past few years, voice command devices or “intelligent personal assistants” as they are also called, have been brought to market. These are software that can be used with voice interaction like Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s Siri. They “listen” to commands, answer questions and perform tasks by accessing online resources. Having a voice, they seem somewhat reminiscent of sentient computers familiar from science fiction films like the serene HAL-9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although the devices are not sentient (yet), their users have puzzled feelings concerning the style and the aim of communication one has with a machine, and also because it feeds information into the guts of a multinational company. A Guardian journalist finds himself sympathizing with the Echo software, activating it with its name (the key word is “Alexa”):
It was not that [the Echo] seemed human, exactly, [–] but that it – she – seemed to merit respect. Yes, partly out of anthropomorphism. And partly out of privacy concerns. Don’t mess with someone who knows your secrets. The device, after all, was uploading personal data to Amazon’s servers. How much remains unclear.
(The Guardian 2015, November 21)