Siri: Subtle, Subservient, Subversive

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In a remarkably uncivil world, there is one source we can always turn to for patience and understanding—our virtual voice assistants. Last year when my husband and I went to Ireland, a very British female voice serenely directed us through roundabout after roundabout, never losing her cool when I failed to get in the right lane or neglected to get take the appropriate turn.

While she carried tranquilly on, my incredibly anxious spouse sat beside me, clutching the door handle, encouraging me to take wrong exits and occasionally even trying to intervene in my driving (he would be outraged if I ever did that to him). 

My husband recognizes that he can’t drive in the United Kingdom or Ireland; his brain simply does not accommodate the change in perspective. The couple of times he took the wheel on earlier trips he took out traffic cones, knocked off cars’ mirrors and left an alarmed pedestrian flattened against a store wall when he came too close to a narrow sidewalk. He simply cannot judge where he is on the road. I, on the other hand—a much lesser driver than he—have never scratched a fender.

Even as the GPS system continues to provide soothingly confident directions, he remains a hot mess in the car. You would think she would be a comfort to me in the face of my censorious partner, but I confess that after a while her unflappable nature began to wear on me. Her disembodied voice, her unchanging inflection, her precise diction, were inhuman. I mean, why shouldn’t she have been annoyed if she had to repeatedly redirect me? Once, I fancied that I could hear a slight edge creeping into her voice but, with typical British reserve, she never cracked.

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Our British friend never put her foot wrong, dependably delivering us to our destinations, but the previous year we had different guide who we dubbed “Beulah” after the most disagreeable person we knew. Beulah was particularly malicious, ignoring the addresses we typed in and depriving us of visits to sights we wanted to see. She reached her peak during a late-night drive home after a day in Dublin. 

We knew it was only an hour’s drive from the train station to the cottage in Tipperary. The cottage did not register with GPS, so I typed in Cashel, knowing I could find my way from that city. As sometimes happens, Beulah chose the “fastest” route, which involved farm lanes and back roads. Time stretched on, the gas in our tank was getting lower, and she continued to take us deeper into the landscape. I had faith, however, and thought I knew what road she was directing us to, so it was to our surprise and alarm that she triumphantly announced “arrived” as we were driving along a one-lane road through a swamp.

It was nearing midnight, we didn’t know where we were and we really needed gas. Happily, at the next intersection we were able to visually locate the lights of a nearby city (not Cashel) and made our way to civilization and a tank of gas. As we exited, I turned to the maps app on my phone, retiring the GPS we had rented at the airport. She was still muttering in the background, however, when we reached our first turn. With continued mischief in mind, Beulah directed us to the right, while my phone said go left. Guess who we believed … She spent the rest of the trip in the glove box.

While Beulah was mischievous, if not downright evil, other virtual assistants have an irritating habit of eavesdropping, a nasty trait in any species. Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft all have their little elves poised to help us but, like the ever-present, almost invisible servants in a Victorian mansion, are they listening to our every conversation? The companies that create them insist that, no, they don’t listen in, but I have never said, “Hey, Siri” to open that app on my phone—my only command to her has been “Go away, Siri!” when she pops uninvited into a conversation. She even had the temerity once to say, “Huh?” when she didn’t get what I had said, to which I replied, “I wasn’t talking to you. Go away!”

Loneliness and laziness have yet to overtake me as we become more dependent on robots and AI to do daily tasks. No, I don’t rise from my chair to change channels anymore, but I still vacuum my own floors, turn the lights on and off and don’t let the refrigerator make out my shopping list. And most especially, I do not need a voice assistant for company.

Ethnographer Sowrabhi Ravi reported on the ways people use conversational agents in their daily lives. Most activities are practical applications such as setting alarm clocks or selecting music, but many also engage in casual conversation with the devices. With the rising number of single-person households now hovering in the range of 30 to 40 percent, it is perhaps predictable that the line between human companionship and conversational assistants can become blurred.

Straight men are more likely to form romantic attachments to their voice assistants, studies show, because assistants have predominantly female names and voices. Because the assistants are consistently tolerant and do not react to raised voices and verbal abuse, creators of popular AI voice assistants have come under fire for the harmful gender stereotypes this perpetuates. Smart devices with feminine voices have been shown to reinforce commonly held gender biases that women are subservient and tolerant of poor treatment.

In her study, Ravi found all participants expected the device to discern their emotions or tone of voice and when the assistants failed to recognize emotional cues, some users responded with anger. “The way people speak to Alexa, Cortana and Siri already changes the way I see them,” wrote Rachel Withers in an article for Slate magazine. “It matters how you interact with your virtual assistant, not because it has feelings or will one day murder you in your sleep for disrespecting it, but because of how it reflects on …[who you are] when in a position of power, and how you treat those beneath you.”

I never analyzed why the British GPS “woman’s” endlessly calm and helpful voice grated on my nerves, but I did say to my husband that the experience would be more realistic if she threw in a few acid barbs along the way, perhaps a rejoinder or two that it’s not her fault if we can’t follow directions. After all, if we are going to ask them to serve us without complaint, wouldn’t it be fair to let them occasionally have the last word?

Kathryn Boughton is editor of the Kent Good Times Dispatch. Her views are her own and do not reflect those of Kent News, Inc., the KGTD’s parent company.

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