Since I read Asimov’s robot stories over and over again as a teenager, I’m fascinated with human-robot interaction. Was Asimov right and do humans generally fear robots? Or will they be winning us over as easily as cute little Aibo does? Will we accept robots as caretakers, who might even be filling emotional voids? Lot’s of small and big questions coming up for this and future generations to tackle.
Here is a small and early one.
Who is serving you?
I’m a firm believer in a general politeness. I make a point in restaurants treating waiters and personnel with the respect they deserve for being human beings on an equal level. Same for employees. And yes I did take job candidates out for lunch and judged their behavior as an invisible part of the interview.
So here is the thing. The first steps in voice recognition made us sound more like robots than the recipients. With Siri, we see a first credible solution that understands natural language on a mobile device. And I hope she is good enough to understand “Siri, please send a text to my wife”, instead of “Siri, send a text to my wife”.
This is not about me feeling the need to treat Siri as a person. She is not. This is me understanding that a polite language is something that benefits from constant practice. This is me being a role model for my children, and others when I’m in public and they don’t always know who I’m talking to. And it is about using advanced technology to add a nice touch. Because I can.
Too little? Too much?
There are many definitions of politeness. I live in California and like the relaxed mix of politeness and efficiency people practice here. How about opening a task with a “please”, without the need to repeat that in every sentence afterwards (“Siri, please create a new note”, “Siri, add to that note”). I don’t know if she’d understand “Could you please…” but that’d go too far for my taste anyway.
Have you seen this video about the guy using Siri to control his beer-pouring robot? He uses command style for Siri “text xyz to beeri” but uses a polite style for his robot “could you please pour me a beer”. Random example but a good start. Most Siri demo videos use command style, but it feels more because the presenters were used to it than giving it some thought.
Summary
So yeah, you might find it laughable to even think about this, but as I said, I’m quite fascinated with where we stand. We are seeing the dawning age of spoken human-machine interaction. Slowly but surely we will have to make decisions on how to deal with robots and AI socially. Apple started with giving Siri a name and, without explicitly stating it, a gender. It will be us, the early adopters, who’ll shape the use patterns. With Siri, it feels like the first time voice recognition technology allows us to act like humans again and I think I want to put it to good use. And be nice to her.
She seems to work fine with please, thank you etc added to phrases.
Great, thanks for clarifying it. I’m still traveling as I write this, with my 4s waiting patiently at home for me.
So far, I have used Siri pretty much only out of curiosity, to see what she can do and what she knows. So typically I ask her questions that I already know the answer to, just to test her. (I guess this is not dissimilar to taking job candidates out to lunch, to see if you will be able to get along with them later?) She always very patiently answers the questions. My guess is she is well aware that I am testing her, because I always end up asking her the same questions over and over again (big time favorite: “What is the largest city in New Zealand?”); I guess that shows I am not creative or knowledgable enough to come up with anything new to ask her. In any case, so far she has politely refrained from pointing out the repetitiveness of questions and tasks. I usually do feel a little bad for wasting her time, so I usually end the session with a “Thank you, Siri”, to which she sometimes responds, “that is nice of you to say, [user name]“. I actually find that touching.