Macs do it, phones do it—even educated drones do it. And by it, of course, I mean “respond to our words with a synthesized speech of their own.” How did it come to pass that the Internet of Things was suffused with this ability to recognize, parse, and synthesize human speech? How did people come to think of such recognition as “listening,” such parsing as “understanding,” and such synthesis as “speaking”? How did technology and culture combine to make this development thinkable—even, apparently, desirable?
Two recent scholarly books attempt to answer such questions historically. Simone Natale’s Deceitful Media focuses on how we came to treat machines as social agents capable of conversation. Specifically, it shows how the dream of artificial intelligence (AI) blurred the lines between computer science and adjacent social scientific fields. Liz W. Faber’s Computer’s Voice focuses on how we came not just to anthropomorphize speaking machines but...
