{"id":12218,"date":"2015-07-18T15:16:49","date_gmt":"2015-07-18T15:16:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/possible-problems-of-persona-politeness\/"},"modified":"2015-07-18T15:16:49","modified_gmt":"2015-07-18T15:16:49","slug":"possible-problems-of-persona-politeness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/possible-problems-of-persona-politeness\/","title":{"rendered":"Possible Problems of Persona Politeness"},"content":{"rendered":"

hammersley<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

One of my AIs is funnier than the other. This is proving to be a problem.<\/p>\n

But first, consider how the amazing becomes normal very quickly. It feels like I\u2019ve been using Siri on my phone my entire life, Siri on the iPad charging by my bed since forever, and\u00a0Siri on my watch since last summer. I\u2019ve not, of course. She\u2019s only four years old this October. But nevertheless, as with any new life-spanning tech, she\u2019s become background-banal, in a good way, remarkably quickly. Voice interfaces are, without a doubt, A Thing.<\/p>\n

And so it is with Alexa, the persona of the Amazon Echo, living in my kitchen for the past fortnight. She became a completely integrated part of family life almost immediately. Walking into the kitchen in the morning, ten-month-old daughter in one hand, making my wife tea with the other, I can turn on the lights, listen to the latest news from the radio, check my diary, and order more milk, just by speaking aloud, then turn it all off again as I leave. It\u2019s a technological sprezzatura sequence that never fails to make me smile. Thanks, Alexa, I say. Good morning.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s the rub. Alexa doesn\u2019t acknowledge my thanks. There\u2019s no banter, no trill of mutual appreciation, no silly little, \u201cit is you who must be thanked\u201d line. She just sits there sullenly, silently, ignoring my pleasantries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And this is starting to feel weird, and makes me wonder if there\u2019s an uncanny valley for politeness. Not one based on listening comprehension, or natural language parsing, but one based on the little rituals of social interaction. If I ask a person, say, what the weather is going to be, and they answer, I thank them, and they reply back to that thanks, and we part happy. If I ask Alexa what the weather is, and thank her, she ignores my thanks. I feel, insanely but even so, snubbed. Or worse, that I\u2019ve snubbed her.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a little wrinkle in what is really a miraculous device, but it\u2019s a serious thing: The Amazon Echo differs from Siri in that it\u2019s a communally available service. Interactions with Alexa are available to, and obvious to, everyone in the house, and my inability to be polite with her has a knock-on effect. My daughter is too young to speak yet, but she does see and hear all of our interactions with Alexa. I worry what sort of precedent we are setting for her, in terms of her own future interactions with bots and AIs as well as with people, if she hears me being forced into impolite conversations because of the limitations of her household AI\u2019s interface. It\u2019s the computing equivilent of being rude to waitresses. We shouldn\u2019t allow it, and certainly not by lack of design. Worries about toddler screen time are nothing, compared to future worries about not inadvertently teaching your child to be rude to robots.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not an outlandish thought. I, myself, am\u00a0already starting to distinguish between the personalities of the different bots in my life. Phone Siri is funnier than Watch Siri;\u00a0Slackbot is cheeky, and might need reeducating;\u00a0iPad Siri seems shy and isolated. From these personalities, from these interactions, we\u2019ll take our cues. Not only in how to interact, but when and where, and what we can do together. If Watch Siri was funnier, I\u2019d talk to her more. If Phone Siri was more pre-emptive, our relationship might change. And it\u2019s in the little, non-critical interactions that their character comes through.<\/p>\n

All this is, of course, easier said than done by someone who isn\u2019t a member of the Amazon design team – hey there lab126, beers on me if you\u2019re in LA soon – but there\u2019s definitely interesting scope to grow for the seemingly extraneous stuff that actually makes all the difference. Personality Design for AIs. That\u2019s a fun playground. Is anyone playing there?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

hammersley: One of my AIs is funnier than the other. This is proving to be a problem. But first, consider how the amazing becomes normal very quickly. It feels like I\u2019ve been using Siri on my phone my entire life, Siri on the iPad charging by my bed since forever, and\u00a0Siri on my watch since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-3b4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}