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The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources - By Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler (2018) [...] "At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. Many of the assumptions about human life made by machine learning systems are narrow, normative and laden with error. Yet they are inscribing and building those assumptions into a new world, and will increasingly play a role in how opportunities, wealth, and knowledge are distributed. The stack that is required to interact with an Amazon Echo goes well beyond the multi-layered 'technical stack' of data modeling, hardware, servers and networks. The full stack reaches much further into capital, labor and nature, and demands an enormous amount of each. The true costs of these systems - social, environmental, economic, and political - remain hidden and may stay that way for some time. We offer up this map and essay as a way to begin seeing across a wider range of system extractions. The scale required to build artificial intelligence systems is too complex, too obscured by intellectual property law, and too mired in logistical complexity to fully comprehend in the moment. Yet you draw on it every time you issue a simple voice command to a small cylinder in your living room: 'Alexa, what time is it?" And so the cycle continues."

"Montre-moi comment tu parles, je te dirai qui tu es C'est le cas de Voicesense, par exemple, une société israélienne basée à Tel Aviv qui utilise l'analyse vocale en temps réel pendant des appels pour évaluer si quelqu'un est susceptible d'être en défaut sur un prêt bancaire, d'acheter un produit plus cher, ou d'être le meilleur candidat pour un emploi. Voicesense exploite le pouvoir de la voix, reliant les modèles de parole aux tendances personnelles pour prévoir le comportement individuel. Pour Voicesense, « la voix est partout. L'écoute des interactions vocales révèle les caractéristiques fondamentales d'une personne, bien plus que ce que les mots réels ne peuvent transmettre. »"

"Une interaction à rapprocher du « dialogue », qui historiquement, s'emploie pour l'échange verbal des personnages de théâtre, puis de cinéma, de radio et de télévision. Dialoguer, « c'est écrire sous forme de dialogue » ce qui diffère de la spontanéité d'une conversation, qui exprime davantage l'idée de « circuler » et traduit une notion de connivence et d'intimité."

"[...] neuroscientists from Columbia University recently made a major advancement toward this futuristic goal, successfully translating brain waves into intelligible speech for the first time." "Rather than directly tracking thoughts to produce speech, the researchers recorded neurological patterns generated by test subjects listening to others speak. These brain waves were fed into a vocoder-an artificial intelligence algorithm that synthesizes speech-and then converted into comprehensible, albeit robotic-sounding, speech mirroring the phrases heard by participants." article scientifique : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37359-z

"Users of Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant conceptualize them in one of 3 ways: an interface, a personal assistant, or a brain. Frequent users are less likely to push the interaction limits of these AI systems than new users."

"Hospitals are exploring new uses in intensive care units and surgical recovery rooms, and contemplating a future in which Alexa, or another voice avatar, becomes a virtual member of the medical team - monitoring doctor-patient interactions, suggesting treatment approaches, or even alerting caregivers to voice changes that could be an early warning of a health emergency."

carte interactive des 24 émotions : https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vocs/map.html#

"Au CRI Paris, en collaboration avec l'IRCAM-STMS, nous explorons cet autre numérique qui fait du corps un médium d'interaction avec l'environnement digital. C'est ce « numérique sans écran » que mettent en avant les outils développés par l'équipe « Interaction Son Musique Mouvement » de l'IRCAM-STMS. Dans ces projets expérimentaux, le smartphone peut devenir un instrument de musique, un objet sonore qui réagit aux gestes de ses utilisateurs."

"But as we move into a world where everyone will be talking to Google, Siri or Alexa, we will have to rethink what the office is for. Do we want it to be a place of real human-to-human interaction, or will it become something of a call centre, in which everyone is whispering to their voice assistant through Madonna-style mics? "

"[...]If you don't happen to work in the tech sector, you probably can't think about all the untapped potential in your Amazon Echo or Google Home without experiencing some misgivings. By now, most of us have grasped the dangers of allowing our most private information to be harvested, stored, and sold. We know how facial-recognition technologies have allowed authoritarian governments to spy on their own citizens; how companies disseminate and monetize our browsing habits, whereabouts, social-media interactions; how hackers can break into our home-security systems and nanny cams and steal their data or reprogram them for nefarious ends. Virtual assistants and ever smarter homes able to understand our physical and emotional states will open up new frontiers for mischief making. Despite the optimism of most of the engineers I've talked with, I must admit that I now keep the microphone on my iPhone turned off and my smart speakers unplugged when I don't plan to use them for a while.[...]"

"Depuis la mi-février 2019, une dizaine de personnes âgées habitant Stockholm, en Suède, testent un nouveau service d'accompagnement, très simple d'utilisation. Un assistant vocal Amazon ou Google les aide à raconter leur vie. En fonction de leurs réponses, de nouvelles questions leur sont renvoyées et une synthèse écrite de leur histoire personnelle, ainsi reconstituée, peut ensuite être envoyée à un écrivain professionnel qui pourra la retravailler. Baptisé « Memory Lane », ce service est proposé par Stockholm Exergi, une entreprise spécialisée dans le chauffage, le refroidissement urbain et l'électricité, et détenue à part égale par Fortum, un producteur finlandais d'énergie, et la municipalité de Stockholm. Mais l'intelligence artificielle qui est au coeur du dialogue avec ces personnes âgées a été développée en France, par le centre d'innovation d' Accenture Interactive, au sein de l'Accenture Labs, à Sophia Antipolis.3

"Dr. Lam is collaborating with a group of Stanford faculty members and students to build a virtual assistant that would allow individuals and corporations to avoid surrendering personal information as well as retain a degree of independence from giant technology companies." ... "The Stanford researchers are hoping to gain support by making their software freely available to users of smartphones, computers and consumer appliances. They are encouraging makers of consumer products to connect their devices to the Almond virtual assistant through a Wikipedia-style service they call Thingpedia. It is a shared database in which any manufacturer or internet service could specify how its product or service would interact with the Almond virtual assistant."

La graal de la voix selon Amazon : avoir une conversation sans y avoir pensé en terme de programmation de bout en bout. Un film- the night out scenario présenté lors de cette rencontre montre une conversation fluide avec alexa pour commander et réserver plusieurs choses : une place de cinéma, un diner et un taxi. L'objectif est de faire accomplir par l'assistant vocal des taches complexes incorporant plusieurs "skills" et permettant de réduire le nombre d'itérations pour faire des tâches comme réserver une place de cinéma ou commander à manger. La voix définira les contours de la technologie des 10 prochaines années. Je veux utiliser le même assistant sur tous les supports (devices) et non par support : l'assistant de la voiture, l'assistant de la télé,...

"With "Project Alias," Bjørn Karmann and Tore Knudsen of Denmark demonstrated a simple yet effective way to take back control over our own private sphere, which earned them the STARTS Prize of the European Commission." "None of us had any smart home devices for a long time, and we were certainly not planning to buy one either. But after Bjørn won Google's AI Experiment Challenge back in 2017 he got a Google Home smart device as a gift from the I/O event. Despite the lack of excitement, Bjørn brought it home for a trial period. It did not take long before frustrations started to build up, and empathy towards the uncanny voice disappeared. Every interaction and behavioral pattern felt predetermined. He felt like a passive consumer who just wanted to give the poor assistant a name that was not the company's brand. And then there was the microphone. A direct link to the servers at Google that always was on and ready to be triggered by your command. So the idea of hacking it started to arise. But as makers, we had to face the sad truth that it was yet another device with a completely closed system. To hack it, we would have to get creative. This is when the idea of a "man-in-the-middle-attack" started. A device that we would trust and which has no connection to the internet. Whose job is to take control of the other assistant and whose name it would deserve."

"Banking chatbots built with AI technologies can understand the contextual request from a customer. They can be taught to ask and answer questions in a familiar, conversational language. This is something that digital interactions with banks are lacking - a more natural, intuitive user experience."

"The ad is called Morning Ritual which has both a 30 second and minute-long version. Created by ad agency Joint London, the ad walks through a woman's morning routine which includes frequent interactions with the Alexa voice assistant. The viewer only eventually notices the fact that the woman is unable to see, as she faces a rain-soaked window and asks Alexa what the weather is like. The whole visual impairment experience is enhanced by the low-lighting throughout the video."

"Parental supervision via voice assistant won't be limited to what happens at home. Amazon announced that it will roll out new Alexa education skills in partnership with education tech companies like Blackboard, Canvas, and Coursera. Students, and their parents, will shortly be able to ask Alexa about homework or for updates posted by teachers on those platforms to stay up to date on classroom activities." "Amazon wants to increase its market share among children, and make them loyal to the voice assistant at an early age. But with children, parents are the gatekeepers. It remains to be seen if the family-friendly features and increased transparency are enough for parents to trust Alexa interacting with their children after the many privacy breaches. If successful, it could set the template for how voice assistant developers approach the market for the younger audience. Still, there's no guarantee any of it will be enough to appease worried parents or head off the kind of regulation Amazon and other voice assistant makers want to limit."