Polly the Voice Assistant Parrot

Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa and other voice assistants are often designed as what I would claim to be a servant metaphor. Hereby their designed personality is build to be considered friendly and submissive. They stand in the shadow until called upon, and tries there utmost to serve their master. Considering the technologies used for these builds upon, namely voice and text recognition with a grain of AI, it can be considered a narrow use of these technoligies.

Polly the Voice Assistant Parrot is a tool to further understand the possibilities of these technologies through the lense of play using Critical Technical Practices (CTP). Polly Parrot is build based on a parrot metaphor. The parrot methapor is something that:

• - can learn human words and sentences but is not necessarily able to understand the meaning.
• - can act on its own whims.
• - does not always understand its owner’s intention.

The prototype are therefore able to interrupt people (inconsistently), learn verbs and nouns heard, break silence in different manners, including using a recording of your voice to activate your other voice assistants, repaeting a sentence until interrupted and singing (playing a youtube video). Polly Parrot therefore is more dominant and unfriendly that the servant methaphor assistants, partly due to computional agency.

Polly Parrot is made using JavaScript and P5.js for logic and RiveScript for simple text recognition.

Credits:

• Emily Louisa Laue Christensen
• Tobias Damm Buhl Schamaitat

Currently Polly Parrot cannot hear you, so please use the text form if visiting it.

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