My Curious Life

Leisa Reichelt poses the question in a recent post about whether there will be a decline in anthropomorphism with the rise in social software. Her question sparked a rousing discussion and got me thinking about how I’d argue that the opposite is likely going to be true as our tools and interfaces become more sophisticated.

It seems that when our tools or devices are operating well, performing their tasks in ways that we expect them to, we hardly notice that they are present, in which case they are quite enabling. When they fail us, though, we are quick to invent reasons for their misbehavior, giving our devices human traits or characteristics. We also tend to give them a personality based upon our positive interactions, too … pleasant surprises or reliable behavior can also endear them to us.

As our technology improves, though, I believe we’re only more likely to instinctually or programmatically give our devices human characteristics. While tactile interfaces, like touch and keypress, and visual interfaces, like folders and animations, are sometimes easy to anthropomorphize, voice interactions almost require more human-like interactions to be taken seriously.

Think of voice activated systems for “climbing” a phone tree. Initial reactions to these systems in the 80s and 90s were skeptical, with the text-to-speech reading of information limited to small interactions due to the halting and jerky speech pattern most systems produced. Without adequate human-sounding output, this type of interaction was often featured as a frightening thing. Shall we play a game?

As text-to-speech and speech-to-text software has improved, more and more systems are featuring near-human level inflection and ever better speech recognition (though there is still much room for improvement in the latter). Ironically enough, many of these improved systems use bits of recorded human speech in order to produce a more life-like effect.

Humanoid animations, coupled with this improved text-to-speech are appearing as news anchors, and as our homes become centers of more intelligence, it’s not too farfetched to imagine your home having a name and a voice, interacting with you in various ways … sharing the weather report, reading news headlines, giving an overview of your calls and updating you on your schedule.

Rather than decline, I think we’ll see the anthropomorphism of technology expand as we begin to expect more and more interactivity and assistance from our devices. Until then, though, if your tech wants to play a game, make sure it’s solitaire.