By Ava Fung

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The creation of Intelligent Personal Assistants marks a new era of human-machine interaction that will influence technology, human communication patterns, and social development. This piece offers insight to the new connections formed with voice assistant.

The world is undergoing a new shift where we are not only creating our biological spawn, but mechanical ones too. Like all parents, we aren’t just changing and influencing our children, but as our children grow older we begin to see them change us. 2011 was when the world’s first widely shared mechanical baby, or Intelligent Personal Assistant, Siri. As we increasingly rely on these devices for communication, a reciprocal influence emerges: we shape their characteristics by infusing them with our personality traits, while, in turn, they impact our modes of speech and communication. Siri, as an example, not only facilitates seamless communication but also serves as a mirror reflecting our values and interactions with the surrounding world. The distinct connections formed by some autistic individuals with voice assistants provide insights into the broader implications for human-computer interfaces and the potential for enhancing social skills development through these technological interactions. Siri’s inception into our life can help us understand ourselves and the values we bestow on the things that products that surround us. The unique connections formed by some autistic individuals with voice assistants hint at broader implications for human-computer interfaces and social skills development.

Siri was created by Apple as a means to push the message that, “At Apple, we believe accessibility is a human right” (Apple 2016). This push for accessibility represents the increasing push for a one streamlined and easily intelligible communication across many people. However, the limited capacity to understand outside the most easily intelligible speech, outlined in Apple’s messaging, is technologically constrained. However, in an New York Times OP-ED by Judith Newman, the mother of Gus, an autistic individual, Newman tells the story of how Siri’s disability in understanding clear articulation as well as direct questions, helps Gus hone his abilities. She writes that “Gus speaks as if he has marbles in his mouth, but if he wants to get the right response from Siri, he must enunciate clearly” (Newman 2014). Siri serves as not just a technological tool but an interactive companion that encourages Gus to articulate himself more intelligibly, highlighting the profound impact of technology on speech development.

Not only does Siri help in Gus’ technical skills, she opens up creative capabilities. A classmate of Gus’, “loves getting information on his favorite subjects, but he also just loves the absurdity — like, when Siri doesn’t understand him and gives him a nonsense answer, or when he poses personal questions that elicit funny responses” (Newman 2014). This lighthearted response is significant because it satisfies a value we cherish in things we appreciate: a sense of personality. According to a scientific study “personification, [an] important consumption value, is positively associated with perceived usefulness” with participants finding Intelligent Personal Assistants 20% more useful if they exhibited this trait (Malodia 2021). Importantly, these interactions go beyond mere entertainment, Newman writes, “My son’s practice conversation with Siri is translating into more facility with actual humans” (Newman 2014). Together, these narratives underscore the transformative potential of technology, particularly voice assistants, in fostering accessibility, communication, and personal growth.

Besides playfulness being linked to usefulness, the degree of usefulness is also influenced by factors such as accessibility and control. When the Intelligent Assistants were more playful, it was found that “consumers enjoy the control they exercise over their voice assistants as a master or a companion. Therefore, consumers find voice assistants to be useful” (Malodia, 2014). In this way, Siri was created to answer questions, not pose new ones making the conversations we have with her all the less complex yet still human. How she accomplishes this duality is Siri “mitages people’s uncertainty and uneasiness with life-like technologies” simply by having a button to turn her on and off on a whim, but also with her distinct sassy personality making us connect to her (Guzman, 2016). This careful balance of personality and power is a way to manipulate us to bend our ill feelings to something that “remain[s] continuously in listening mode, awaiting a keyword from their users to ‘wake up’ and record” (Burbach 2019). 

This acceptance of Artificial Intelligence in our life is a symbol of change in point of view from not just thinking about humans and technology as separate. Yoseph Bar-Cohen, a NASA senior research scientist, anticipates the inevitability of a human-robotic future, citing societal preparations evident in popular culture, as seen in movies like Toy Story portraying robots positively (Geller 2008). This forward-looking mindset prompts discussions on ethical considerations in human-robot interactions. 

However there are still limitations on what we see on what people will accept from technology. While Intelligent Agents can surpass international boundaries without physical constraints, the scope of their influence is bounded by the limits of societal acceptance and cultural considerations. In this way, our interaction with technology is not only shaped by its impact on us but is also subject to predefined thresholds. Different beliefs between Eastern and Western religions influence perceptions of humanlike robots, revealing contrasting levels of acceptance. Bar-Cohen writes, “In America, we barely have any robots that look very human. But in Asian cultures, they’re more acceptable. There’s a Shinto belief that God is in everything, including robots, and children there grow up with stories of a robot as a savior of the people. Meanwhile, Judaism prohibits making statues and things that look like humans, because they’re an image of God. There’s a concern that we can create something that will destroy us” (Geller 2008). 

This friction is dually met by the way that conversational AI’s integration into every corner of the Internet has already started to influence commercial and political interests. In a study about consumer interaction it was found that there was a paradigm shift in the last 5 years between consumers’ use of voice assistants to shop online. One of the findings was that they went “ from searching directly for brands to asking their voice assistants questions about brands. Information answering these questions is retrieved by the voice assistants’ respective algorithms, which ultimately influence consumer purchase decision-making” (Burbach 2019). While these devices are seemingly catering their options to things we like, we are relying on them for suggestions on essentially who we should be or buy based on something as simple as one Google search.

Intelligent Personal Assistants were the launching pad to more advanced technology that combined their ability to converse with a physical presence. This is already happening with the creation of deep-fakes, which are digital and auditory manipulations of real people that are so similar to the actual person they are trying to represent that they can be a powerful tool for manipulating the public. A harmful effect was seen in 2019, when a deep-fake video of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, surfaced on social media. The manipulated video slowed down Pelosi’s speech and altered her facial expressions to create the false impression that she was intoxicated or impaired. This marks a truly impactful departure from just using Intelligent Personal Assistants as helpful parts of our lives to gain information on the world to seeing how deep-fakes are used to create new information that seems trustworthy. 

Another challenge that psychologists found that deep-fake production imposes on human interaction is that it exacerbates the existing challenge of authenticity in online communication  (Guzman 2016). The phenomenon of linguistic convergence further complicates this, as individuals alter their speech patterns when aware of being recorded or when anticipating a broader audience. This formalization is observable not only in one-on-one interactions, such as that between Siri and Gus, but extends to broader social contexts. As people communicate with their devices and engage on social media platforms, there is a discernible trend toward refined and polished speech (Guzman 2016). Just as individuals naturally mimic the speech of those around them, the constant connection we have to our devices where we are heard and seen by everyone, there begins a convergence to perfection perpetuated with the fact that someone can always be listening.

By talking to screens and machines, humans have been reduced to a mechanical copy of themselves and our relationship to our individuality is compromised and we begin to adopt a culture with no history, only an object that is based on normalizing outliers. While “technology is designed to be erased from the user’s view… with Siri we are confronted with making sense of a technology that has a face that we cannot see, a technological lineage that is real and fictional” (Guzman 2016). This can raise alarm to the many people who notice that that technology’s culture is not our own, and we are left with trading parts of our humanity to feel more comfortable around it, and technology and proliferation of surveillance leading us to be more mechanical and streamlined in the way that we communicate. This fine line between these two concepts makes it so individuals are not put off by Intelligent Personal Assistants and instead place them in a position of society that is not on the same level as a human assistant, but still kind of close. Newman writes, “It’s not that Gus doesn’t understand Siri’s not human. He does — intellectually. Gus feels that inanimate objects, while maybe not possessing souls, are worthy of our consideration” (Newman 2014). 

Works Cited

Gehl, R. W., Bakardjieva, M., & Guzman, A. (2017). Chapter 4. In Socialbots and their friends: Digital Media and the automation of Sociality (pp. 69–86). essay, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

L. Burbach, P. Halbach, N. Plettenberg, J. Nakayama, M. Ziefle and A. Calero Valdez, “”Hey, Siri”, “Ok, Google”, “Alexa”. Acceptance-Relevant Factors of Virtual Voice-Assistants,” 2019 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm), Aachen, Germany, 2019, pp. 101-111, doi: 10.1109/ProComm.2019.00025.

T. Geller, “Overcoming the Uncanny Valley,” in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 11-17, July-Aug. 2008, doi: 10.1109/MCG.2008.79.

Newman, Judith. To Siri, with Love: How One Boy with Autism Became BFF with Apple’s Siri. HarperCollins, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/fashion/how-apples-siri-became-one-autistic-boys-bff.html

Process

Back in November, when I began writing this I was also in the early stages of my first months of college taking a class called Attention!. This class focussed on researching the history of the “Attention Economy,” meaning how attention has become the currency of the twenty-first century. Through a series of books and research papers, we journeyed through the history of social media to learn our servitude to the devices of advertisement to perpetuate our so-called free economy. As subjects to the unsolicited consumption of our time by the hands of the billboards, posters, and posts that are around every corner, understanding that their success is not only measured by the money we spend towards that company but also the time media spends in our mind and subconsciously influencing our decisions.

This class inspired me to think about my own relationship with technology, a sort of step-sister to my older brother and I, Siri. I hoped that this piece would answer some questions about why she was such a huge part of my life, what historical significance she has and what that looks like for others as well.