SIRI AND HAL 9000 SOFTWARE
SIRI AND HAL 9000 SERIES

These come from continued introduction and refinement of machine learning techniques. Improvements in voice assistants aim to make an assistant that solves problems rather than introducing frustrations. The final step is to convert this text to speech through audio for the user. Once the meaning of the received data is understood, the voice assistant retrieves information from the Internet, a cloud platform or an application to answer the question as appropriately as possible, generating a sentence in text to convey this answer. Then comes the complex task of syntax and semantic processing, which means that the voice assistant works to understand the meaning of the converted text, looking at sentence structure, grammar, contextual information and the meaning of words. At this initial stage, any speech from the user is converted into text. When a user then says something, the voice assistant works to convert this ‘actionable data’. It can be activated with a ‘ wake’ word so, for example, users of Amazon’s Alexa can call out “Alexa” and Apple users can call out “Hey Siri” to activate the respective voice assistants.

How does a voice assistant work?Ī voice assistant begins to work once activated by a user. The market leading and most well-known voice assistants include Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, the Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana.įollowing improvements in Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) technologies voice assistants can now display relatively high accuracy in their functionality and are consequently becoming more and more popular among consumers. Commands can be given and questions asked of the voice assistant which can perform the tasks or services requested.

SIRI AND HAL 9000 SOFTWARE

What are voice assistants?Ī voice assistant is a piece of voice recognition software used through electronic devices such as smartphones and speakers can produce audible and natural communication with an end user. It explains what voice assistants are, how voice assistants work, the evolution of voice assistants and, how voice assistants might evolve and progress in future. It makes important contributions to conversations around the gender gap and the increasing acceptance of transgender people.This “explainer” article looks at the future of voice assistants. Going beyond current scholarship on robots and AI to focus on voice-interactive computers, The Computer’s Voice breaks new ground in questions surrounding media, technology, and gender. Faber ends her account in the present, with incisive looks at the film Her and Siri herself. She then moves on to an intrepid decade-by-decade investigation of computer voices, tracing the evolution from the masculine voices of the ’70s and ’80s to the feminine ones of the ’90s and ’00s.

SIRI AND HAL 9000 SERIES

Faber explores contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment.įaber begins by considering talking spaceships like those in Star Trek, the film Dark Star, and the TV series Quark, revealing the ideologies that underlie space-age progress.

Why is Star Trek’s computer coded as female, while HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey is heard as male? By examining how gender is built into these devices, author Liz W. A deconstruction of gender through the voices of Siri, HAL 9000, and other computers that talkĪlthough computer-based personal assistants like Siri are increasingly ubiquitous, few users stop to ask what it means that some assistants are gendered female, others male.

Siri and hal 9000