STOP THE CHITCHAT BOTS DON'T NEED TO SOUND LIKE US

摘要

Bert brautigam is sick of having conversations with his devices. Like many of us, Brautigam, who works for the design firm Ziba, uses voice assistants like Google's phone AI or Amazon's Alexa. The theory is that voice commands make life more convenient. But these assistants are scripted to emulate everyday conversation. And everyday conversation is filled with little pauses and filler words, the "phatic" spackle of social interactions. That's why Alexa says things like "Sorry, I'm not sure about that," or Siri says "OK, here's what I found..." when it delivers search results. It's how humans talk. But when a bot does it, the chitchat clogs up the flow of command-and-action. It is gradually driving Brautigam nuts-not just the bots' tics, but the ratiocinations he has to go through to make them do, well, anything. "If I want to turn on the flashlight on my phone," he says, "I say, 'Turn on the flashlight.' It's four words, but all I should need is one word, right? 'Flashlight!'" For years, sci-fi promised that one day we'd interact with machines as if they were people. But what if conversation turns out to be a lousy idea? We've been down this road before. It's the problem of so-called skeuomorphic design: In the early days of a new technology, designers mimic the look and feel of older media. Apple's first iPad calendar app resembled a paper day planner, including "pages" that you'd rip away as time passed. Sometimes designers use skeuomorphs because they're imprisoned by the past, unable to imagine the demands of the new. (Early cars had buggy-whip holsters.) And sometimes they do it on purpose, to ease future shock. Either way, skeuomorphs slow things down by adding functionally useless interactions. It's only when designers finally abandon them that they're free to create zippier interfaces.