Alexa can now sound as depressed as you
Finally, the depressed robot Douglas Adams promised me has arrived.
Well, sort of. Amazon announced "Alexa emotions" on Wednesday, which let developers make Alexa sound "happy/excited" or "disappointed/empathetic." (Each is available in three levels of intensity.)
To be clear, this isn't something users can set themselves, but an option for developers when they're building skills. Amazon suggests making Alexa "happy/excited" when the user wins a game, for example, or "disappointed/empathetic" when they check sports scores and their team has lost.
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If you listen to them, they're carefully calibrated to be both evocative and impersonal, anticipating and reflecting the user's presumed emotions rather than expressing them on the AI's part.
Here's the happiest (i.e. highest intensity) happy Alexa, which has a warm, musical, but insincere quality, like an infomercial voiceover:
And here's the saddest sad Alexa, a disconcerting mix of downcast Eeyore and appropriately solemn funeral director who is sorry for your loss:
You can hear all the different levels on YouTube at the below links, via Amazon, and also use them to calibrate your own intensity levels if you wish:
(As a side note, the sample phrase Alexa is saying — "I'm playing a single hand in what looks like a losing game" — is a quote from a story by adventure novelist James Oliver Curwood. If you ask me, the poker metaphor has an eerie Westworldian key-phrase quality to it when you listen to it over and over.)
Nobody would accuse Amazon's voice assistant of being particularly expressive, but there are days when even Alexa's mild, neutral default tone feels like an affront to your mood. With this, you could set an outside temperature range you're happy with in the weather-forecast skill so that Alexa could sound appropriately miffed for you when it's going to be miserably hot or cold, for example. Or perhaps someday you could just ask her to read you the news sadly, to replicate the experience of reading the news yourself.
Of course, we're now teaching Alexa, an AI we order around, how to feel — or at least how to produce a facsimile of relevant emotion in specific contexts. There's a non-zero chance that could end poorly.
Caitlin is Mashable's Australian Editor. She has written for The Guardian, Junkee, and any number of plucky little music and culture publications that were run on the smell of an oily rag and have since been flushed off the Internet like a dead goldfish by their new owners. She also worked at Choice, Australia's consumer advocacy non-profit and magazine, and as such has surprisingly strong opinions about whitegoods. She enjoys big dumb action movies, big clever action movies, cult Canadian comedies set in small towns, Carly Rae Jepsen, The Replacements, smoky mezcal, revenge bedtime procrastination, and being left the hell alone when she's reading.
