Methodology I'm Honoured To Serve
To dig deeper into how we created I’m Honoured To Serve, we explain how we collaborated with artificial intelligence (AI) and the intent behind our critical examination.
1. Methodology
Voice assistant technology is embedded in almost all smart phones today and is moving quickly into the home via the increase of smart devices. It offers a new style of interacting with technology broadly in the consumer world. Compared to our interactions with technology through vision and touch, our voices open a different process and experience of knowing. This new interaction raises questions about how this technology should sound and what it should, or shouldn’t, be saying. Living in this reality of voice assistant technology, we’ve been working through the answers to these questions often without explicitly interrogating them. This project acts as a step towards explicitly working toward understanding this new consumer technology and its impacts.
To understand voice assistants, let’s first start with their inner workings. The backbones of voice assistants rely on a few different technologies. First, our words are translated into textual representation by breaking the words into distinct sounds and then statistically determining what is the most likely word that was spoken based on voice datasets. Then, the textual representation is compared to a variety of other sentences and grammar rules, and then the voice assistant can determine what the request is and how it should respond. If there are certain action words like “call,” “ask,” or “look up,” the device will know the action it will take.
However simple and logical the processes of a voice assistant may seem, there is an entirely other aspect to the creation of these devices that is glanced over: the deep character development that the assistants are created with. The creation of, for example, Google Assistant, involved writers and creative teams that developed in-depth background stories, and embedded personable character traits into their voice assistant. They even went to the extent of creating an entire timeline of events, like what school the character would have gone to, their interests, and the awards they won. From this, they developed opinions, character traits, etc., that would help create a personable character that consumers would be excited to interact with, just like how we can get excited and emotionally attached to fictional characters in TV shows, movies or books.
Within the context of voice assistants, their creations and their functions, I’m Honored to Serve attempts to note this meeting of technology and fiction as a springboard for exploring voice assistant technology broadly. It raises some interesting questions about what we accept as technology, should we care that they are developed as marketable fictional characters, and how does that change the way we interact with technology broadly.
2. Process, Approach and Methods (Why we made all the decisions that we did)
Our investigation with voice assistants took place primarily with the Google Assistant. As one of the most popular voice assistant technologies along with Siri and Alexa, we were able to interact with a technology that is broadly used by the public. This allowed us to engage with a technology that a mass audience is tapped into in various ways. Engaging with such a technology, as opposed to one with a more niche audience, offers an opportunity to engage more critically with the effects and impacts within a broad social perspective.
Not only is this popular technology used broadly by the public, it also fits into an interesting product line category for a company. Google Assistant is embedded in the Google Home line, while also offered as a free application on their other devices. It is a product that is embedded in a wide range of devices as an application. It raises questions, such as what is the motivation to embed this product, and what does Google gain in return by offering this assistant to a broad audience.
To investigate this question of motivation we looked more into the intricacies of the assistant technology and how they are developed. We wanted to learn about the personalities that are developed behind the scenes by creative teams mentioned earlier. What are the ways that a creative back story has affected the assistant’s interactions with the user and shapes the technology? If we were to know what kind of personality was imagined around the product, then perhaps we could come to a better understanding of voice assistants as a mass adopted technology.
A process that we developed to understand the assistant’s personality was interacting with the Google Assistant to see if we could work backwards in understanding the personality it might have been built on, while also engaging with possible effects of that personality background. We approached this by asking the Google Assistant questions similar to those you might ask a new friend. We wanted to “get to know” the personal assistant and understand its background, the personality it was given and the way that it reacts to the world through its embedded “experiences.” Asking questions like “what makes you angry” and “what is your biggest fear” returned scripted responses that showed the friendliness and silliness of the assistant. However, we quickly realized how limiting simply asking questions like this was. The assistant wasn’t made to have long conversations about feelings, but merely to act as an assistant with a quirky attitude.
As we developed questions and went through a question-answer process with the assistant, we concluded a more effective way to expose the underlying characteristics of the virtual assistant would be to create a dialogue that could highlight its personality while also shedding light on its abilities, or inabilities, as a technology. To do this we created a hypothetical situation of interviewing the virtual assistant for a job as an assistant. We asked it questions about its work experience, its skills, its weakness, etc. These prompts worked as a simulation of a real-life situation that could be compared and contrasted against the jarring nature of technology being used as a replacement for a human assistant. It gave us a story to work through to uncover responses that expose who the virtual assistant attempts to act as, how it works, its abilities and inabilities.
Through developing a script in the form of an interview, and creating a brand around the voice assistant, we were able to comment not only on the concrete technology that is offered in society, but also the technologists, or marketers, behind them. This allowed us to focus the question more specifically towards the creators of technology: those who have the capital and power to produce something that can be introduced into a large market.
I,m Honoured To Serve was generously supported through the Scotiabank Fund for AI and Society at the University of Ottawa AI + Society Initiative, the Faculties of Engineering and Arts (uOttawa), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.