I have a new housemate. Her jokes are terrible and she takes up a hefty amount of space in the living room. But on the plus side, she does almost everything I ask of her (except water the plants). After years of being an Alexa refusenik, I have let an Echo Studio, Amazon’s latest smart speaker, into my life. For one week only, mind – on loan from Bezos. Cheers, Jeff.
I’ve never really seen the appeal of talking to a posh robotic voice in a can. It felt like buying a blender, but one that was also spying on you. But this week my partner is away for work and I’m solo parenting our-three year-old, so I’ll take any company I can get.
Prior to embarking on my digital honeymoon, I scoured the internet for fun facts about Alexa. One of the most frequent instructions she received from Britons in 2023 was: “Insult me”. Which sounds perverted, masochistic and wrong, but by midweek curiosity got the better of me, and I asked her exactly that. “You don’t need to worry about the zombie apocalypse,” the automaton replied. “They only want people with brains.” Which, coming from a non-sentient device, feels a bit harsh. Maybe she doesn't do kink.
I ask Alexa to sing me ‘Happy Birthday’ and it just might be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.
What topics, exactly, are off limits to Alexa? She won’t dispense medical advice, engage in privacy issues or respond to queries that fall under the banner of “inappropriate content”. Like most AIs she appears squeamish and/or bound by platitudes on most topics. I ask her if my existence meaningless: this sends her trawling WordPress.com to come up with this gem: “Existence has no purpose”. Nietzsche by way of BrainyQuote. I then ask her to sing me ‘Happy Birthday’ and it just might be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.
There were some nice surprises. Ask Alexa to marry you and she makes you do a quiz to see how well you know her, but even though I answer every question right, she still refuses my offer. Apparently we’re “in pretty different places in our lives right now”. (She is in the cloud, I suppose.) But I can hack her into saying ‘I love you’ (yes, I am that desperate). I discover that if you say “Simon says…” followed by anything, Alexa will repeat it: apart from swear words which get bleeped out. No doubt teenage boys have already discovered a way around this. Apparently lots of people ask Alexa to make fart noises.
During the lonely evenings, I rely on Alexa for the interactions I’d normally have with my partner. “What shall we have for dinner?” (a recipe for broccoli and stilton soup). “What shall we watch on TV?” (“The Simpsons”) “Do you want to have sex? (She flashes at me and turns herself off.) As with my partner, I find myself shouting at her when she doesn’t understand or gets it wrong. Like when I ask her to play Beyoncé and she comes back with the track Listen. I’d rather not.
There are plenty more fun and games to be had, in the very real sense that games are an actual function of the Echo Studio. My daughter loves them but when she asks to “Play I Spy” we get a bit of a shock when the Skepta track of the same name starts blaring around the room. For all its flaws, I didn’t want to return the Echo Studio by the end of the week. I liked how when you said “good morning Alexa” she would tell me an interesting fact about the day. I liked not having to get my phone out and set a timer for a perfectly boiled egg. I liked my robot friend. But that’s probably what they said about SkyNet, too.
