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These days searching for a number in a five centimeter thick telephone directory seems very old-fashion. Voice recognition systems are becoming more and more common and efficient: the best of them apparently recognize 49 out of every 50 words.
These devices save companies a huge amount of money. Stephen Evans in New York has been talking to the machines and to the men who design them.
I had a bit of Basil Fawlty moment the other day; I rang 411, the American directory enquiries which now uses a voice recognition system. I told the machine I wanted the number for "Harlem Auto Mall" and she—for this machine had a female voice—replied Harlem Public School 154. No doubt, like lots of people, I found myself ranting.
Machines, you see, have personalities, and banks, phone companies, railways and all kinds of alleged help lines are spending a lot of money trying to find out what kinds of voices to give the machines that speak to us, the public, on their behalf.
Generally, the tests show that people are less persuaded by female voices than by male ones(though people are more like to be antagonized by a male voice). On the upside, male voice machines are perceived to have energy and authority. One of the results of that, for example is that in Japan a stock-broking company used a female voice on its machine to give information on stocks and shares but then a male one to make the actual sale.
Now, in many part of the world, when you hire a car, you get a navigation system—a little electronic map on a screen with a machine voice. In America, it’s a female voice(whom I like to call Gladys). She tells me say, to make a right in two miles and—I fancy, at least—gets exasperated if I don’t follow her directions: "Recalculating Route", she snaps, in her American English.
Now, in Germany when they tried a similar system, men reacted against being given directions by a female voice so it had to be taken off the market. Old people, by the way, take advice more readily from young people than from their own age.
Tone matters to drivers. Professor Nass is working on a system where the machine- voice changes according to how you address it. He’s discovered that irritable drivers can calm down if the voice on the navigation system is subdued-though, for some reason that he doesn’t quite understand. calm drivers get wound up by subdued. low-key voices that don’t vary in pitch. So the next task is to vary the navigation system’s voice according to how grumpy you, the driver, are. If you sound aggressive to the machine, the machine will change tone to calm you down.
The technology is improving all the time. Basically, machines that speak first involve a human actor recording countless different words and syllables and a computer then reassembling the sounds into coherent sentences, according to what it thinks you’ve said to it. These machines are getting bertter and better, better able to recognize more accents and variations. They’re also better able to talk back without sounding like a machine. It seems like the androids are getting very good indeed.
And companies like them a great deal. They even construct personas around the voice on the machines that speak for them. One of the Canadian telephone companies published a biography of the imaginary woman its machine was imitating. She was Emily, a nice small town girl who had a history degree and went back-packing round Asia after college. With some panache, a local radio host decided to call her up. Emily, of course, being a machine could only answer his chat with lines like "You’re calling to check your account balance. Is that right"
It may be thought that the company has the last laugh. Emily is paid no wages and the telephone company reckons it saves three million dollars a year by employing her instead of a crowd expensive, high-maintenance human-beings. There’s no doubt that soon the androids will speak better than we do—and they’re much, much cheaper—they’re much, much cheaper—much, much cheaper.

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