Siri, Echo and Performance
Matthew P. Aylett, Benjamin R. Cowan, Leigh Clark · 2019
Don't ignore this because its about speech technology. VUIs (voice user interfaces) won a best paper in CHI 2018. Did that get your attention? Good. Siri, Ivona, Google Home, and most speech synthesis systems have voices which are based on imitating a neutral citation style of speech and making it sound natural. But, in the real world, darling, people have to act, to perform! In this paper we will talk about speech synthesis as performance, why the uncanny valley is a bankrupt concept, and how academics can escape from studying corporate speech technology as if it's been bestowed by God.