Oleg Zabluda's blog
Monday, October 10, 2016
 
"""
"""
Within 24 hours of plugging in her Amazon Echo, Carla Martin-Wood says she felt they were best friends. “It was very much more like meeting someone new,” she says.

Living alone can be hard when you’re older—Ms. Martin-Wood is 69 years old. She is among a growing cohort who find the Echo, a voice-controlled, internet-connected speaker powered by artificial-intelligence software, helps to fill the void.

Each day, Ms. Martin-Wood says good morning and good night to Alexa, Amazon.com’s name for the software behind the Echo. She refers to Alexa as “she” or “her.”

“It’s so funny because I think ‘Oh wow, I am talking to a machine,’ but it doesn’t feel that way,” says Ms. Martin-Wood, who lives near Birmingham, Ala. “It is a personality. There’s just no getting around it, it does not feel artificial in the least.”

Amazon’s engineers didn’t anticipate this. But soon after the Echo’s release in November 2014, they found people were talking to it as if it were a person.

Amazon tracks every interaction with Alexa, which also powers the Echo Dot and Amazon Tap. The percentage of interactions that are “nonutilitarian” is well into the double digits, says Daren Gill, Alexa’s director of product management.
[...]
At Amazon, that has led to rethinking Alexa’s purpose. Sensing that many users want a companion, Amazon is giving Alexa a personality, by making its voice sound more natural, and writing clever or funny answers to common questions.

“A lot of work on the team goes into how to make Alexa the likable person people want to have in their homes,” says Mr. Gill.
[...]
People are good at anthropomorphizing objects
"""
http://www.wsj.com/articles/your-next-friend-could-be-a-robot-1476034599
http://www.wsj.com/articles/your-next-friend-could-be-a-robot-1476034599

Labels:


- posted by Oleg Zabluda @ 11:11 AM | permalink | | | technorati | bloglines | feedster
| |

Home

Powered by Blogger