![]() The smart assistants are also programmed to be culturally competent in their relevant market. This could steer would-be consumers away from thinking of them as dangerous surveillant machines.” “Smart voice assistant developers adopted this concept after recognising its value in getting consumers to identify with their products.”īig tech companies’ adaptation of the voices of specifically female voice actors was strategic, explained Dr Humphry: “Not only does this leverage the notion of females as naturally sympathetic and helpful it is the antithesis of the ‘menacing male’ or ‘monstrous mother’ cinematic robot archetypes, with their heavily synthesised voices. “In all the above examples, the voice is a crucial vehicle with which robots express a persona,” Dr Chesher said. How robots informed the voices of smart assistants In I, Robot (2004), the computer VIKI and her robot hordes turn against people in a maternal effort to protect humanity from itself. In the Disney movie Smart House (1999), the smart home, personified as the voice of PAT, turns into a controlling mother who flies into a rage when the family refuses to cede to her maternal demands. Their speech, for instance, has features of natural conversation such as more animation and meaningful pauses.Īmidst these ‘menacing males’ and humanlike robots emerged ‘monstrous mother’ archetypes – maternal figures with misplaced instincts. This can also be seen in the 2015 British TV series Humans, where two groups of anthropomorphic robots, called ‘synths’ are distinguished by one group’s ability to more closely resemble humans. “In the 2016 TV series Westworld, for example, as the robots Maeve and Dolores achieve more sentience, their behaviour becomes more naturalistic, and their voices become more inflected, cynical and self-aware.” “Robots have increasingly tended to become more psychologically complex characters, and this has been accompanied by variations in modality in voice and speech,” Dr Chesher continued. ![]() Today, this kind of robot predominates on the small and big screen. ![]() “The replicants in Bladerunner are very hard to distinguish from humans,” Dr Chesher, Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures said. It wasn’t too long, however, that popular culture robots morphed again this time, into humanlike robots, like those in the film Bladerunner (1982), who, in speech, more closely resemble a Siri, Alexa, Cortana (Microsoft) or Google Assistant (Google Home). ![]() With distinctive sounds that gave the robots a sense of ‘otherness’, they became associated with narratives of science gone out of control.”Įxamples of such robots include those in films Forbidden Planet (1956), The Collossus of New York (1958) and the infamous computer HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968), where the computer’s allegiance to the mission at the cost of the crew becomes murderous. “They went from representing ‘marvels of futuristic technology’ in the early 20th century, to sounding darker and more sinister from around the 1950s onwards. “This is underscored by the progression of robot voices in popular culture from the earth 20 th century onwards,” said Dr Humphry, a Lecturer in Digital Cultures. ‘ Menacing males’ and ‘monstrous mothers’ĭespite smart voice assistants’ popularity, largely due to their default naturalistic female voices and helpful personalities, their uncanniness – seeming to be something between human and robotic – deters many people. In a paper recently published in New Media & Society, Dr Justine Humphry and Dr Chris Chesher from the Department of Media and Communications trace anxiety about smart voice assistants to a long history of threatening robot voices and narratives in Hollywood. Yet not everyone embraces them, with some finding them intrusive and surveillant. With people remaining homebound due to the COVID-19 pandemic, smart voice assistants may now be playing even bigger roles in people’s lives. As at January 2019, nearly a third of Australians owned a smart speaker device like an Amazon Echo or HomePod that allow you to call on ‘Alexa’ or ‘Siri’, respectively.
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