Open Questions & Next Steps

For the demo session, we choreographed an interaction with Alexa programming a series of unsettling answers to familiar questions as a means to provoke a reaction among the audience. For instance, we overrode the intent “Tell a scary story” with “What did you dream about last night?” Or “What are Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics?” with “Is something bothering you?”

After the presentation most of the questions were about the assistant’s responses, which led us to think of a more advanced prototype that uses natural language processing to map the tones of voice according to the meaning of a conversation. Instead of just alternating between them in series.

As a secondary discussion, we talked about both the form of the platform and Alexa’s position in relation to an everyday encounter. We evaluated the choice between hiding (embedding) versus displaying the device, and we landed on the conclusion that as a “performative object” the current version is more robust.