Voice Interaction and the Future of Computing

Adam Dorfman suggests that voice interaction is a wave of the future, and encourages Microsoft to continue promoting Cortana.

-DD

Female Voices

Eden Faithful considers the primarily feminine voices employed in artificial intelligence as reinforcing cultural subservience.

Faithful's criticism reminds me of the description of a household robot from a 1956 science fiction novel:

"That's why we called the monster 'Hired Girl' -- it brought back thoughts of the semi-slave immigrant girl who Grandma used to bully."

Heinlein, Robert A. (1956). The Door Into Summer. Fantasy and Science Fiction, 11(4), p. 17.

-DD

WWW.SPEEGLE.CO.UK - Provides Audible Results

WWW.SPEEGLE.CO.UK is a search engine that has a computer-generated voice speak the text of the search results. This might be useful to a person with visual problems, but I was amazed at how much less time it takes to visually scan the result list.
^-D.D.

NOTE:Speegle seems to have disappeared by the close of 2007 -- too bad