If you wanted to buy a toy in 1922 you might pick a Flossy Flirt Doll, whose key feature was that her eyes could roll up and down. You could select a Tim the Tinker Toy Boy, which was made of smooth wooden balls threaded together with strong string. Or you could opt for the original Teddy Bear, so called because it was named after President Theodore Roosevelt's appearance in a cartoon where he was pictured refusing to kill a baby black bear.
You could also buy Radio Rex, which was a brown bulldog made of celluloid and metal who lived in a wooden house with a red roof and his name on the front. What made Rex stand out from the others was not his design, which was pretty basic. What was unique was a small electromagnet in his house which was activated by sound. Say "Rex!" loud enough and a switch holding the magnet released, popping Rex out to take a walk. Simply put, his appearance was based on the sound of your voice. And so you could make a case that nearly 90 years before Siri drew her first breath Radio Rex was the first voice assistant.
These days we're on a first name basis with more and more electronic helpers. However, as opposed to HAL, the all-powerful and brilliant servant who turns deadly in "2001: A Space Odyssey," today's assistants are mostly simple beings with vast knowledge and limited skill sets. Ask them the crop yield of Namibia or the time of the next sunset and you'll get an answer back in seconds. But ask them to send an email or start dinner or and you'll either get "Sorry, I can't do that" or just as likely "Millard Fillmore was the 13th president of the United States."
Still, if you are of a mind, more and more of your interactions with services and suppliers can be based on voice input, with all the good and the bad that that brings. To be sure, convenience is certainly a factor: no need to type or unlock anything. All you do is speak, and your new friend will respond. Want to know the balance in your checking account? Erica, the online assistant from Bank of America, will happily oblige. If you're an employee at Walmart, you can "Ask Sam" to pull up store maps, look up prices and locate products for customers (a shopper version is in the works). Windows users have Cortana, and Samsung aficionados have Bixby. Each listens intently and tries to do your bidding, which is likely more than you get from anyone else in your household.
The big dogs are Siri, Alexa, and the nomenclature-challenged Assistant from Google. What they do it is truly remarkable: they listen, convert that sound into bits, blast that query to some data center halfway around the globe, solve for the ask, then blast it back and reconvert it back into speech, all within seconds. If the result was close even 10% of the time it would be amazing. The fact that your lights get turned on or you pull up that Elton John track or you get the weather for the weekend 90% of the time is nothing short of magic.
As they become more ubiquitous, however, they can start to feel like you have a precocious and nosy child in the house. You find yourself whispering around them, less you trigger them to become part of the conversation. A friend who is a talented musician posted a video about her new track and sent me a link. I called it up: in it she says "Ask Alexa to play the new Claudia Hayden track!" Well, MY Alexa heard her, jumped to Spotify and up came "Central Park West." Was it subliminal control, advertising, or happy coincidence? Either way, it's a great tune.
And that will happen more and more. Wake words be dammed, if you can say it they will do it. But take pity on that poor subset of individuals whose folks thought they were naming their daughters after a character in the TV show "Party of Five" or Barbie's best friend in the movie "The Diamond Castle." Ask those Alexas what the weather will be, and they just might give you a forecast for a place where the sun don't shine.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford is trying to recognize his own speech. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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