Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Dealing with Non-Human
Don’t you find that now that technology is here to stay, our relationships have been forever altered? Phones are rarely answered by a human now. I mean, whenever you call someone most of the time you get a voice mail. “I’m out having a wart on my rear end frozen. Leave a message and I’ll call you back when I feel like it.”
How did we survive before voice mail?
 And when you call a business, the phone is answered by an automated voice which guides you to which buttons to press depending on the reason for your call. And then you have to wait and wait and wait until a human finds the time to listen to your request. You waste time but the company manages customer service with a minimal number of humans.
We simply have to accept that non-humans are everywhere in our lives even though we can’t see them. They not only answer phones, they guide a truckload of operations from keeping inventories up-to-date at all times to some automated voices guiding us on our way as we drive.
Is there a gabby machine like Siri or Alexa in your home? Voice technology scientists have succeeded in making these non-humans sound almost human. You can ask these machines anything and they will answer you or tell you where to go. Literally. Statistics show that over 90 per cent of North Americans report having talked to Siri. That female is one busy non-human.
It’s interesting don’t you think that these virtual assistants are overwhelmingly female voices. I suppose that the reason is that people find a woman’s voice more caring and eager to assist – like a true live assistant.
When testing a real human voice against a computer generated voice, scientists found that it was difficult to tell which was which in a short clip. The result was different in longer conversations. One reason is that non-human voices have perfect diction while we real humans always talk in an imperfect manner (except perhaps for TV news anchors). Things like “ums” and “well” and “you know” often pepper what we say. Will there be a day when non-human voices will ape these imperfections?
Of course, with all these non-humans, privacy concerns are real. Some say that these machines record what we say to each other all the time. I don’t know if that’s true, but with technology forever galloping who is to say if in the future we will be able to manage to keep secrets of any kind.
The latest innovation, of course, is facial recognition. It is just beginning to be used, but it is predicted that in the not too distant future facial recognition will replace passwords to unlock everything from smart phones, to laptop, to the front doors of homes which begs the question what will happen when people get facelifts? but I digress.
 I wonder if it will really be that way. It seems to me that not all innovations make it. Many end up on the discarded pile. Case in point: the Google glasses that were expected to be purchased by everyone. For some reason people didn’t think catching up on the news on their eyeglasses as they walked was really useful. Go figure!
Another point is that at the moment we certainly have no guarantee that what we do on-line remains safe from prying eyes. Hackers have certainly seen to that, haven’t they?
Is it a brave new world or a scary one?