Voice Interfaces and the Absurd
I have grappled with the ‘absurd’ since I first got to the US and had to fill a form listing my race. Before that, I had never thought of myself as belonging to a race. My identity was bracketed in many words—son, student, engineer, or extrovert—but never Asian or brown. This divorce between my reality and the reality thrust upon me elicited a lurking sense of ‘un-situatedness.’ An actor disillusioned by the actant. That day something strange happened—I inadvertently acquired a new lens to survey the world. Now my world was divided into races, and differences promptly emerged. Differences I still feel stifled or enraged by.
Since then, the absurd has become a quotidian part of my life. Like a cat, you don’t think about, till it appears on your doorstep demanding food or water, or whatever it is that cats want. However, the ‘absurd’ seems to announce itself most prominently in my interactions with voice-enabled technologies. When I ask Siri to set me a timer, and it starts singing a rhyme; when I ask Alexa to navigate me to a pizza shop, and it gives me information on pita. The absurd thickens because I am not only a user but also a researcher, a developer, and a designer. Four identities rolled into one—four lenses of looking at the same phenomenon.
To some readers, this might seem like a meaningless ramble. If you try to make sense of it, the answers to my existential musings are indeed quite simple. Some technologically-minded individuals might even say, “well, you are having problems with Alexa because the speech-recognition technology is not perfect; till a 100% accuracy is achieved, people are doomed to have such bad user experiences.” To those readers, I would say, “point taken, but that’s not what I am trying to say.” My experiences are not a subject of bad or good UX—they have evolved into my idea of a bad or good life. These experiences have assimilated into how I think or talk; in short, they are a part of my idea of ‘self.’
“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”
In the above quote from Albert Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus,” a succinct definition of the absurd can be encountered. It is revelatory to note that Camus says man is “deprived” of memory. Deprivation indicates an actor and an actant—implying an actor cannot experience the absurd without an actant, a reason. Technology could very well act as a reason or a source to detach an actor from a situation, forcing the actor to reflect upon the said ‘detachment,’ resulting in an experience of the absurd.
When technology works how it is supposed to work, there is no divorce to be had; there is no absurdity. But when technology behaves unexpectedly, the ‘outside’ world seems to breeze in, and the ‘order’ of the world becomes apparent. Once you start reasoning with the now-visible world and your place in it, you engage in a futile negotiation with the world—or yourself, because the world does not engage with you; you do. All your previous experiences wrestle to make sense of the current existential blip on your radar. The multitude of forms you filled, the identities you conserve within yourself, the people who birth you, everything concentrates into a tiny seed and manifests as this perpetuating tree of disillusionment. A reductionist way of looking at it would be—technology makes you aware of your ‘self.’
Voice technologies, especially, have the most curious way of doing this. Speech and language, the most prominent of human discoveries, the nadir of human ingenuity, is also its most personal invention. A plethora of information is packed into voice—your gender, nationality, race. When voice technologies malfunction, the consequences can be quite absurd. The autopsy that takes place after could be existential in nature.
(I find this notion to be quite funny. Technologies are meant to distract, disengage, to take our attention away from life. After all, we are “users” of technology. We are addicts. The idea of technology probing us to look within could even be thought of as absurd—but it does—this essay is proof.)
Picking up my designer hat, I ask, “Is this desirable? Should technology make you think of existence? Should we be designing for the absurd?” Well, the answer is tricky and quite philosophical in nature. Does your absurd, like Nietzche’s, engulfs you in dread? Or does it, like Camus’, makes you want to live more? However, regardless of where you fall on your feelings towards the absurd, we should be studying it, as it will reveal a deeper understanding of us as people and this strange world we cohabit.
