Who's That Lady?

Who's that lady?
Beautiful lady, lovely lady, real fine lady.
Who's that lady?
- The Isley Brothers (1986)

Beth was our first.

Eighteen years ago she came into our lives and defined the trusted employee relationship for us. She provided a valuable service, and as people who never before had live in help, we learned to appreciate the obvious benefits. That said, as a personality, she had her contradictions and quirks: she was intelligent, calm and authoritative, while also being single minded, subservient and prone to oversharing. Still, on balance we saw it as a net gain, and welcomed her help. Never mind that she was just a voice assistant on the GPS in our new car, she was our Beth.

But like most people, and I guess artificial intelligence avatars, she got old and set in her ways. Newer, hungrier and more adaptable youngsters started to elbow their way in, able to do more and adjust easily to their surroundings. Related by heritage if not by DNA, Siri, Alexa and their sisters soon proved their meddle, and Beth was looking more and more antiquated. Perhaps we should have showed compassion for the old girl, and set her up in a comfortable apartment to live out the remainder of the days. Not so. While we usually treat others with thoughtfulness and respect, we kicked her to the curb with nary a thought and brought in new blood. Try not to think ill of us.

There were several reasons we moved on. Primarily was that Beth was a one-trick pony: as Paul Simon wrote in a song of the same name, one trick was all that horse could do. Her replacements, by comparison, are highly skilled and multi-talented. In addition to getting us from place to place they are adept at switching on lights, running timers, providing answers to questions and more. The results are impressive, and their repertoire is only growing. But something else that is also proving evolutionary: their personalities.

As these ladies grow and learn, they are changing how they react. Virtually every time we tap into one of them, be it to time a cake in the oven or plot a route to a destination, we have noticed small changes. It might be a reminder of a new features, as in "Twenty Minutes. Starting now. By the way, if you need more time, just say ‘add time.'" Or a change on the screen in the car whereby certain unused icons disappear, then slide back on when the screen is touched. And all of this personal growth is happening in the background. Night school, I guess.

Even their voices and names change while the underlying "being" does not. With Google Assistant, you can toggle between 10 different English voices - 6 female and 4 male. Amazon now has a male or female option, and you can call it Echo, Amazon, Computer, Alexa, or just added, Ziggy. My phone is set to chat with me as Sydney Harbour Blue, a lovely Australian woman. However, when my car came back from being serviced and I hooked my phone in for some directions, it randomly toggled between Sydney and Red, the default American female. My vehicle became a mobile version of "Three Faces of Eve."

In 1950 pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing created what he called "The Imitation Game" as a way of judging if a computer could really think. Later dubbed the Turing Test, the idea was that if a questioner couldn't differentiate between a machine and a person, then the test was passed. It wasn't the quality or correctness of the answer that mattered, but how it answered: did it seem to come from a person in style, syntax and form? Originally it was to be done only as text. Voice synthesizers were crude, and would have immediately tipped the scales. 

That future is here now. As we yell at Alexa's and Siri's inability to answer our perfectly reasonable questions, the test would seem to be more than aced. It's not that we don't know that Beth and her offspring are machines, it's that their responses are not the responses we want. We treat them like not-too-bright students, rather than computers that can speak. That should be the real Turing Test: when you start to treat it better than your spouse or your kid, you know we have crossed the Rubicon.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is learning to use voice more than his keyboard. 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.