When headphones talk to you - the creepy voice in your head
19.9.2016
Translation: machine translated
Apple's Siri talks to us. Google's nameless voice assistant does too. So does Amazon's Alexa. As technologically advanced as these things are, they're kind of creepy. I let my headphones talk all over me and asked user interface designers.
"I am now connected to your media library," a woman's voice says in my ear. It sends shivers down my spine. The voice in my head actually means well and it's not coming from my head. I'm the only one who hears it, but that's only because it's the voice in my headphones. When the day is long, she tells me a lot. Often that she has just lost the connection to my mobile because her Bluetooth skills leave something to be desired. Then she sometimes tells me that I've been on my bike for ten, twenty, thirty minutes and that I've been working hard.
The system is easy to explain. But why is it so scary? Why do I talk about it as a she and think of a woman in my head? And: Are the voices really that creepy or am I completely crazy?
The technology - the creepy part
The voice in my headphones has a system. The principle is called Zero UI and will probably be the future of design. The term was coined by Andy Goodman, Group Director of the design company Fjord, when he described how the screen is slowly but surely becoming obsolete.
The idea behind Zero UI is simple: it's about technology interacting with people in a more natural way. Pressing keys, as I am doing to write this article, is not a natural way to write. Neither is pressing icons on a screen to launch an app.
Computer systems are penetrating further and further into our everyday lives. My headphones talk to me because they don't have a screen and my mobile is a few metres away on a table because I'm lifting weights. If I needed to know how long I've been lifting weights - the woman in my ear informs me of my progress every ten minutes - without my headphones talking to me, it would go like this:
- Lose the weights
- Take a deep breath
- Take off your trainers
- Tap off the magnesium
- Dry the sweat off your hands
- Walk five metres to the table
- Switch on the screen
This also works for many other things. Let's say we want to know where the nearest pizzeria is. Either we simply ask Siri "Siri, where is the nearest pizzeria?" and Siri compares our GPS position with the results on Google Maps, plots a course there and displays it on the map, or we have to do it all ourselves.
The inspiration for this idea includes the computer in Star Trek and HAL 9000 in "2001: A Space Odyssey".
Chief Miles O'Brien pilots a shuttle while being shot at and talking on the phone
In short, the less interaction we have to have with the screen, the more agile we are. The latest generation of the Internet of Things - devices connected to the internet - even dispense with screens altogether. Amazon's ECHO is leading the way.
Amazon's Echo manages without a screen
Interacting with computers without a screen and with little human intervention is fast, simple and pioneering.
The question that the Zero UI concept doesn't answer, however, is: why is the voice of my headphones so creepy?
The creepiness comes unexpectedly
"I suspect that there is a lack of social contact," says Otmar Hilliges, Professor of Advanced Interactive Technologies at ETH Zurich. After all, social interaction that appears natural involves much more than just the voice, its inflection and modulation. "A real person wouldn't sneak up behind you and whisper in your ear without being asked, but would make themselves known beforehand," he adds.
Although Hilliges cannot give a definitive answer to the question of why the woman in my ear is creepy, he knows that communication takes place on many more levels than just the voice. These include body language and eye contact, which establish a willingness to make contact even before the first spoken tone.
The woman in the ear can't do all that. She's just sitting in a pair of futuristic-looking headphones that exchange data with my mobile. No matter how nice she sounds, she'll never have eyes, or a posture. I can't answer her either, although I often mumble something like "Yeah, I know, shut up now" when she tells me that she can't read my music library.
That leaves me with two options:
- She remains creepy to me
- I get used to it
The latter seems more plausible, because Zero UI is probably an integral part of the future of our interaction with computers. I'd like to take this opportunity to ask everyone: Is it really just me, or are computer voices creepy? Have you already got used to it? And which zero UI devices do you think are cool?
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.