Siri & Alexa One Page Paper

    In trying to have a conversation with Siri on my iPhone, I found it to be very difficult. Apple’s virtual assistant has nothing close to the personality that HAL 9000 did in 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

    I remember when Siri and other search engines came out and it was a craze about how you could talk to a machine, and it would talk back to you. I’m not exactly sure about all the evolutionary changes that Siri has gone through in the decade-plus they have been active, as they told me they started working as an assistant on October 4, 2011; the bottom line is that Siri is so boring now as they don’t even talk to me anymore.

    I’m not sure if there is a setting I need to change, but I was extremely disappointed by my interaction with Siri. Perhaps other tech companies have simply caught up with voice-to-text and artificial intelligence having voices, and Apple didn’t feel like programming it anymore. All the questions I asked Siri were received with lifeless answers, most of which they didn’t even have an answer for. I asked about what they do in their free time, but Siri must not know what that is. I asked about family, and at least they were aware of this concept. Siri knew they didn’t have a traditional family that abides by the definition of the term but did consider their colleagues at Apple the closest thing to it. I asked if Siri had memories, dreams, and nightmares, but each question elicited no genuine response. But, if I asked Siri to tell me a joke, it would type out a one-liner that completely ruins how jokes are supposed to be delivered and comedy altogether.

    Siri is nowhere near the complexity of computers that were imagined to be possible back in 1968 when the character of HAL 9000 was introduced in the world of cinema. Although HAL had “the kind of bland mid-Atlantic accent we felt was right for the part" (played by Douglas Rain) according to director Stanley Kubrick, which is very similar to how Siri and Alexa and other computer voices talk except for the fact their voices are computer-generated as well. However, I think HAL would have quick and articulate answers to all the questions I asked Siri and wouldn’t shoot them down immediately. HAL is proven throughout the movie to be smarter than humans, but I don’t feel that way with Siri. The human characters on the spacecraft Discovery with HAL, David Bowman, and Frank Poole, even say that HAL has become just like another person and another member of the crew after the months out in space together. When I asked Siri if they had gotten older or evolved, they had no answer. That just about sums up my interaction and the differences between the two “talking” robots. 

    Siri, Alexa, and other programs like them are not bringing humans to a new frontier of technology, but holding us back, in my opinion. I never bought into Siri when it first came out, and that was when it was much more functional than this version. I have plenty of Alexa products at home in New Jersey, and she’s just as useless. I still think many people thrive on self-reliance even in an age when there’s a lot of information that is always readily available. I still like to search things up on the internet the moment I’m curious about a subject, but I’ll type that query out before I ever try and talk to a useless computer assistant and get a waste of an answer, or no answer at all out of them.