Siri is being very...helpful

[kestrell]

This morning I had a Zoom meeting and found myself saying first "Hi, Sara," and then "Hi, Paul," but it seems that Siri now also answers to the name Sara (or perhaps Sara is her evil twin?) and believes that "Hi, Paul" means that she should go ahead and phone Paul, and meanwhile Alexa mutters that she doesn't know how to respond to that name.

I'm contemplating renaming the aerye the Singularity.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Yikes!

Has someone written a two-hand play for “ai”-ish voices?

"AI" -- those really are scary quotes

[bibliofile]

I know someone who was on a video call with one person. When one of them asked their Alexa to do something, the other person's Alexa responded. (Fortunately, it was probably something comparatively harmless, like change the music being played, and not starting a game of Global THermonuclear War.)

Re: "AI" -- those really are scary quotes

[kestrell]

During the Sight Tech Global virtual conference in December, which was all about tech visually impaired people use, speakers came up with all sorts of aliases for Alexa and still, occasionally someone would forget, and then you would hear Alexas chattering away in the background. I need to do a semiotics study and go through all the recorded panels so I can collect all the Alexa aliases.

[dewline]

And this is why I am not going to use voice-controlled features if I can avoid needing them. I do understand that such choices are not available for everyone, and at some point, I may need to change my thinking on the matter.

In the meantime, of course...

[kestrell]

I completely understand. For my part, though, I have been living with the growing pains of voice recognition and speech synthesis since the 1990s, so it is really just part of my every day reality.

Now, the story of how a lesbian geek friend and I spent an entire day trying to reprogram my screen reader so that it would stop pronouncing "pussy" as "puh-sy" (the first syllable rhymes with bus and boy, was that off-putting)...