The talking robot

There are two types of people: the type who are polite to Alexa, Siri and similar others, and my type who treat them with mild contempt. My wife and I have this ongoing debate along the lines of,
“It’s only a machine. Why waste your breath?”
“You can still be polite. What do you lose?”
We have not resolved this argument.
For example, my wife goes,
“Alexa, please switch on the light; Alexa, tell me what’s fata morgana, please; Alexa, thank you very much.”
My interaction is similar, but I miss out the pleases and thankyous.

I have a reason.

Way back in 1997, I was a PhD student/Research Assistant at the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield (DCS). Our group had several students working in robotics and we even had a full-fledged robot, Murphy. Other groups worked in speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP). I used to follow their research with keen interest. Making a computer respond to and understand spoken language is extremely hard, like trying to put toothpaste back in its tube, the pundits said at the time. Alexa and others have come a long way since then, as we know.

One Saturday morning, I took my family to a science fair at Doncaster, a nearby town. There was this robot installed in one of the stalls, all swivelling head and blinking eyes and flashing lights. It’s info sheet claimed the robot was able to talk and respond to you just as if it were another human being. I was impressed. What’s all the fuss at DCS then? I wondered. Here’s a robot which claims to pass the Turing Test (when, judging by its response in a conversation, you can’t make out if it’s a machine or human.)

There was a sign pinned on the robot: ‘Talk to me.’ That was my cue to put it to a rigorous test. Let me say my academic curiosity got the better of me before you say, ‘how naïve.’

The conversation with the robot went like this:
“Hello, good morning.”
” Good morning, sir. I am Mary, what’s your name?”
“I’m Gopi.”
“Are you enjoying the day?”
“Oh yes. Very much. Particularly impressed by your speech recognition and NLP abilities.”
“N.L… ? Hmm, thank you very much Gopi.”

We had an intelligent conversation touching on politics, the problems of the world and how to solve them, the weather and everything else.

To say I was impressed would not begin to express the amazement and admiration I felt for Mary’s creators who had cracked the NLP problem completely. Here was a full blown, almost sentient, robot who could understand spoken language and speak just like any other human being. How could this be while my colleagues at DCS struggled on with rudimentary phrases?

Then I had an idea. My family, including my 8 year old boy, had moved on to other stalls bored of my protracted interaction with Mary. Out of the blue, I told Mary,

“Fuck off.”

Now, I am not a vulgar man. I rarely use four letter words unless I am in the company of close friends. This was an academic exercise. I wanted to know how Mary the sentient machine would react.

A young woman in her late twenties tore out from behind the curtain. Her otherwise pretty face was contorted with anger. She was holding a microphone with a long cable attached to Mary.

“You … you … you told me to …,” she stuttered, half sob, half shout.

She would have hit me had my expression not been a mixture of disbelief, shock and disappointment.

My disdain for machines who pretend to understand human language, stems from that day at the science fair. I refuse to say please and thank you to Alexa and her ilk.