I'm Talking to You

Maybe Robots Should Have Their Own Language

DALL-E. Prompt: “In the style of a newspaper photo, tourists and locals struggling to communicate with no common language. The tourists are robots.”

When I was a kid the "robot voice" was a flat emotionless script of machine-ish words like "affirmative" and "analyzing," emerging from what sounded like a $3 speaker. It was a movie and TV cliché. Now an AI "robot voice" can all-too-easily sound like Scarlett Johansson and be as fluent as you are in your Facebook posts and tweets (which may have helped train it). And this voice, unlike the old clunker's speech, really exists.

Yet robots and AIs still talk only in bland middle-class California idioms ("Awesome. Let's see if you can keep up your streak!") or in Japanese department store enthusiasm ("let's all get up and move! I am here to help!") Robots can have the syntax and voices of humans, but they lack the ability to vary their style, and tune it to the occasion. Why can't a robot (or a disembodied AI) say "that was fire, dude, on Go…