So now all week all I’m talking about is music and the news but here in the these times of COVID and stay at home orders, I’ll guess it’s not too surprising for one’s media diet to include a lot more streaming audio.
Anyway, I was listening to possibly the only electronic music band I can think of that’s both clever and bucolic, which is I guess how through-and-through English they are coming through. So here’s the song for you to listen to while you read this:
I happened to be working, so this jumped out at me, but I’ll guess when this song was originally relegated to a 2003 b-side analogies to speech technology weren’t top of mind.
This song samples recordings from a well-known BBC program from the 60s and 70s that’s primarily interviews with children. (If this sounds weird and creepy, this is in the 7 Up era, and around the same time a single-digit-aged Michael was the lead singer in the Jackson 5. It was the times.)
The thing that jumps out at me though is the little girl talking about how people with “push” and “noisy” people seem to “get on better.” Just a few years ago, when I started working on Alexa, my friend Sumedha handed me her device on my first day and said I should get used to saying stuff to Alexa.
I would be doing this over and over all the time as a primary part of my job, so it wasn’t weird, but I was clearly a little surprised. Very matter-of-factly she explaiend that the wake word interaction isn’t natural, since no one already talks to a cylinder on their kitchen counter (at the time – this is 2016) and most people are pretty self-conscious at first, so I should get over that.
Importantly though, once I started talking to the device in an open office I realized this was much more true than I’d considered a couple months before in a suburban living room. After I tried the 10 or so things I knew it did though, it got hard.
It’s a little counter intuitive, but I know my phone (or VCR, or Lite Brite, etc) does a bunch of things because I’ve done it before. Trial and error is a natural mode of learning for virtually any process that requires combinations of memory, actions, and will.
I might have bought my magic pocket computer because of a marketing blurb, but until I’ve actually twiddled the knobs of the three cameras or 4 processors or 5 modes for something, I would have no idea how they related to what I wanted and what I needed to do about it.
I had no theory of mind for Alexa yet. I had no anticipation of what this thing that understood me talking and talked back knew about what I said, and what I had said.
Distinct from this, I had no mental model of how the interactions should go for any new request. This means it’s hard for me to formulate an utterance for pretty much anything I’ve never done before because I have no idea what Alexa could actually do.
“Just ask for music, news, information, and more,” is what the marketing copy of the most popular Amazon Echo device leads with but as a person at home, I don’t usually ask anyone for music or news. I just hit a button or turn a knob, or in many cases, look at a screen, or even a piece of paper that someone left on the porch or in the mailbox.
On the other hand, I ask for lots of information at home, but even if my Echo could tell me where the tiny screwdriver for eyeglass hinges is, why would I ask Alexa when I just plugged the thing in yesterday? Or if there’s another thing of toilet paper. What time does the mail come? Is there another thing of dog food or do I have to go to the store?
I’m exaggerating, but in my experience, the majority of people who use virtual assistant devices had a good long breaking-in period where they were getting used to saying things to the device.
Now that we’re finally breaking away from a century of the idea of a fixed self and acknowledging that code-switching and intersectionality is the norm, not the exception, it strikes me that what the little girl in the show/song is saying about who gets on better is not actually about a real person in the world.
We believe it does. We believe there are these go-getting, me-first types who are eager to get ‘er done and confidently do everything, and do it right, the first time.
But we’re all the little girl. Moreover, her reluctance to “push” and ability to get along with folks but feeling uneasy that her discomfort with being “noisy” is actually how most people feel. And most of the time!