What do you think Siri looks like? Is she someone you would tell your secrets to? She’s not a person—but she’s getting more personal than ever—could she change our real relationships?

In this episode Chris & Adam chat up the voice part of “voice assistants.” More talking and less typing—what happens when as we shift our interaction with technology to the very personal medium of voice?

Links & Quotes

• Alexa, How Will You Change Us by Judith Shulevitz (The Atlantic)

• Female Voice Assistants Fuel Damaging Gender Stereotypes, says a UN Study (MIT Technology Review)

Oral verbalization, unlike writing, is thus natural. The word comes to each of us first orally in our mother tongue. It’s association with mother and early nature and nurture is why speech is so closely involved with our personal identity and with cultural identity. (22)…

No real word can be present all at once as the letters in a written word are. The real word, the spoken word, is always an event….

Oral utterance thus encourages a sense of continuity with life, a sense of participation, because it itself is participatory.

Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Cultures

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