Shouting at smart devices is like tilting at windmills

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Imagine if you had a child called Alexa and every time you shouted at her, your smart device of the same name kicked into action.

And let’s say you asked her those kind of rhetorical questions our mammies used to ask us, how would this digital diva react?

Age-old questions like – do you think I’m made of money?

Or the other variation – do you think money grows on trees?

Do you know what I’ll do with you?

Where do you think you’re going without your coat?

Have you any idea where the sink is in this house (substitute dishwasher if you were born this century)?

Do you know there are children starving in Africa?

Turns out that, for the most part, Alexa doesn’t have answers to rhetorical questions.

Because her response to the question as to whether or not I’m made of money was ‘Sorry, I don’t know that’ – as it was for all of these, including, surprisingly, the fact that Alexa had no knowledge of child starvation in Africa.

Of course, the odds on you actually having a child called Alexa are fairly thin – which might be one of the reasons Amazon chose the name in the first place, to avoid unnecessary domestic confusion.

The official reason is that Amazon developers chose the name because it has a hard consonant with the X – and that helps it be recognized with higher precision. Unless it’s been shouted at by Jonathan Ross.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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