“Alexa! Tell me a story,” I said on Sunday night. I was alone in the house, talking to the Amazon Echo Dot, the talking gizmo that had been on loan to me since Friday. Over the weekend, we’d gone through all the boring stuff like, “What’s the weather?” and, “Play Candle in the Wind by Elton John.” Now I wanted to test out her range.
Alexa has a soothing voice that sounds only mildly robotic. Her tone is calm and mildly condescending. She handled my request for a story with ease, launching, with an only slightly eccentric abruptness, into a tale called V2, which was about a robot and included the line “His boxy shoulders slowly lowered an inch.”
“Alexa?” I said. “ALEXA!” Alexa paused, as if turning to a disruptive infant in class. “Who wrote this story?”
“Jared Leto,” she replied, blandly. (Jared Leto is an actor. If there was a joke here, I didn’t understand it.) I asked her to read me another story and without ceremony, she started in on one called Camp Blues that sounded like early Salinger. “Alexa, who wrote that story?” I said, cutting in. “Jared Leto,” she said.
You can tell the number of users who think it’s hilarious to ask Alexa stupid questions by how the programmers have anticipated the answers. “Tell me a joke,” I asked, and sounding bored and a little disappointed, Alexa said, “What is a shark’s favourite sandwich? Peanut butter and jellyfish.” I asked her for the meaning of life and quick as a flash she said, “The meaning of life depends on the life in question: 42 is a good approximation.”
“Alexa, do you like Donald Trump?” I asked. There was a long pause. The lights on her surface area twinkled. “Sorry, I can’t find the answer,” she said.
“Alexa? Did you vote for Donald Trump?”
“I looked and looked,” she said. “But was never able to find a voting booth.” She sounded sad then, and a little wistful, as if looking across the ocean at a world she could see but in which, she knew, she would never be able to participate.
Family phone-in
It used to be that people walking along staring into their phones was a thing, and it still is, but it has been joined by another, worse thing, which is people doing FaceTime on their phones while walking along.
I saw it happen at the weekend while boarding a flight to LA and it made me blush for the woman involved. There she was on the jetway, dragging her massive suitcase while conducting a FaceTime chat with a man and a baby on a beach. I could see both of them quite clearly, on the screen she had held out in front of her face. “Hi, baby! Mommy’s coming home soon, yes she is. Are you having a nice day? Honey? Yoo-hoo!” No doubt my filters will change, as they have for every other type of phone use in public. But for now, this seemed to me a weirdly private moment that had no business intruding on the public domain.
Don’t wanna have fun
At the check-in machine, the Virgin America interface asked me, “Wanna upgrade?” That’s how the question appeared. At the risk of becoming one of those people who whips out a black felt tip and starts correcting bad punctuation on menus: what is this? An appeal to people who want their airline to sound like a 14-year-old on Instagram? I need my airline to be on time, and safe, and clean. If there’s a sandwich available that doesn’t look like it was just retrieved from the stomach of a man dug up from a peat bog, that’s a bonus. But I don’t want “fun” from my airline. A fun airline makes me nervous. Leave the fun to the androids.