Wordyard

Tim Green

“Creating a Computer Voice that People Like,” by John Markoff, New York Times (Feb. 14, 2016):

It is not yet possible to create a computerized voice that is indistinguishable from a human one for anything longer than short phrases that might be used for weather forecasts or communicating driving directions….

Beyond correct pronunciation, there is the even larger challenge of correctly placing human qualities like inflection and emotion into speech. Linguists call this “prosody,” the ability to add correct stress, intonation or sentiment to spoken language….

For those like the developers at ToyTalk who design entertainment characters, errors may not be fatal, since the goal is to entertain or even to make their audience laugh. However, for programs that are intended to collaborate with humans in commercial situations or to become companions, the challenges are more subtle.

These designers often say they do not want to try to fool the humans that the machines are communicating with, but they still want to create a humanlike relationship between the user and the machine….

The researchers looked for a machine voice that was slow, steady and most importantly “pleasant.” And in the end, they, acting more as artists than engineers, fine-tuned the program. The voice they arrived at is clearly a computer, but it sounds optimistic, even a bit peppy….

Imperson, a software firm based in Israel that develops conversational characters for entertainment, is now considering going into politics. Imperson’s idea is that during a campaign, a politician would be able to deploy an avatar on a social media platform that could engage voters. A plausible-sounding Ted Cruz or Donald Trump could articulate the candidate’s positions on any possible subject.

“The audience wants to have an interactive conversation with a candidate,” said Eyal Pfeifel, co-founder and chief technology officer of Imperson. “People will understand, and there will be no uncanny-valley problem.”

Photo: Katie Spence

From “Negotiations at the IRL/URL Border,” by Jamie Lauren Keiles in Vice | Motherboard, May 5, 2015:

In this present moment of negotiatory online messiness, we must realize that online institutions will eventually become as concrete as anything we can touch or feel today, but that it may take some time for things to shake out.

I like to imagine social media as a prosthetic technology. We have language already to describe our relationship to the objects we allow to become parts of our physical selves. The artificialness of a prosthetic arm doesn’t undermine its usefulness or its validity. We need not fully become our online personas in the future, but surely we can make space for them as something real and integral to the project of building a tangible life and an authentic self. The best IRL/URL future is a porous fluid membrane in which real life informs online and so becomes it in an infinite blurry loop.

This is from David Remnick’s New Yorker interview with President Obama from last June:

“I have strengths and I have weaknesses, like every President, like every person,” Obama told me. “I do think one of my strengths is temperament. I am comfortable with complexity, and I think I’m pretty good at keeping my moral compass while recognizing that I am a product of original sin. And every morning and every night I’m taking measure of my actions against the options and possibilities available to me, understanding that there are going to be mistakes that I make and my team makes and that America makes; understanding that there are going to be limits to the good we can do and the bad that we can prevent, and that there’s going to be tragedy out there and, by occupying this office, I am part of that tragedy occasionally, but that, if I am doing my very best and basing my decisions on the core values and ideals that I was brought up with and that I think are pretty consistent with those of most Americans, that, at the end of the day, things will be better rather than worse.

“I think we are born into this world and inherit all the grudges and rivalries and hatreds and sins of the past,” he continued. “But we also inherit the beauty and the joy and goodness of our forebears. And we’re on this planet a pretty short time, so that we cannot remake the world entirely during this little stretch that we have. … But I think our decisions matter. And I think America was very lucky that Abraham Lincoln was President when he was President. If he hadn’t been, the course of history would be very different. But I also think that, despite being the greatest President, in my mind, in our history, it took another hundred and fifty years before African-Americans had anything approaching formal equality, much less real equality. I think that doesn’t diminish Lincoln’s achievements, but it acknowledges that, at the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.”

It turns out that this was not, for Barack Obama, a rhetoric of resignation at all, but a kind of resolve.

Rich Juzwiak in Gawker on the questionnaire staff writers at Bustle fill out to determine whether they have personal stories that would make good copy:

The market rewards personal storytelling with attention — the more lurid and specific, the better. Just a few weeks ago, we saw a young xoJane writer seemingly pushed to the brink by what she perceived to be the demands of her job and her reluctance to reveal. Nora Ephron’s signature mantra “everything is copy” has become the norm, except everything can’t ever be enough when your job is to churn out posts on a routine basis.

What this survey looks like to me is a crystallization of the industrialization of confession. It’s an efficient, logical method for testing how much of their guts writers want to spill, and which guts exactly. It was probably inevitable that something like this would be invented, even if it didn’t come from a company whose entire genesis reportedly derived from a rather cynically deterministic view of what women want to read about. Its depressing inevitability resembles that of factory farming…

We think of the digital world as a playground for con artists and shape-shifters, but they don’t require computers to do their thing, and never have. From “The Lives and Lies of a Professional Impostor,” by James C. McKinley Jr. and Rick Rojas in the New York Times:

Investigators say Mr. Wilson is a professional impostor and a skilled forger. Though fraud has become an increasingly invisible offense in a digital world, Mr. Wilson has stuck with a decidedly old-fashioned approach, stealing checks and creating new personas, occasionally with accents and falsified papers, the police said.

He has portrayed himself as a Scottish-born D.J., a Cambridge-trained thespian, a Special Forces officer and a professor at M.I.T. He has posed as executives from Microsoft, British Airways and Apple, always with a military background. He pretended to be a soldier seeking asylum in Canada to escape anti-Semitic attacks in the United States. He once maintained an Irish accent so well and for so long that his cellmate in an Indiana jail was convinced that he was an Irish mobster….

Tattooed across his fingers in green ink is a Gaelic phrase, “Mair Fior.” He says it means “Stay True.”

What Facebook’s On This Day shows about the fragility of our online lives — Leigh Alexander in the Guardian:

In many senses, we’ve lost control of our own stories online – the ongoing “right to be forgotten” discussions that began in the European Court of Justice in 2014 act as a partial concession to that point.

Instead of a shoebox of pictures and a diary, your child will grow up depending on interconnected platforms and services. Her entire history, from the first ultrasound picture you share to your network to the day she has a headache to the day she makes a snack, and on like that, will be documented – and could belong to service providers. Unless we can regain control of our narratives online, unless we can discover a way to value our social content, thisflickering constellation of forgettable “moments” and social media “memories”, is the main way our histories will be kept.

Felicity Duncan writes in The Conversation:

Teens engage in complex management of their self-presentation in online spaces; for many college students, platforms like Snapchat, that promise ephemerality, are a welcome break from the need to police their online image.

Increasingly, young people are being warned that future employers, college admissions departments and even banks will use their social media profiles to form assessments. In response, many of them seem to be using social media more strategically. For example, a number of my students create multiple profiles on sites like Twitter, under various names. They carefully curate the content they post on their public profiles on Facebook or LinkedIn, and save their real, private selves for other platforms.

This dynamic has been underway for some time. Of course, Facebook and Twitter each began as new ways for us to connect “authentically” with each other on the Internet of a decade ago, which some users felt had grown impersonal and become overrun by ads. These services won us over with their personalizations and intimacies; then, in the quest for revenue and growth, they became polluted public spaces themselves. So the cycle turns again.