Device Register

Smart devices are starting to make good on the promise that we’ll be able to make nearly any request in the same way we would talk to a friend and that request will be fulfilled. But for now, it still feels vaguely awkward and we still get mixed results. Truly, it’s a wonder that I can ask anything from historical dates to the spelling of ‘necessary’ (which happens way more often that you’d think) to the weather conditions to the contents of my shopping list, but we’re just not quite there yet.

Anyway, what is that awkwardness? Partly it’s the anticipation of having to ask the question again if/when I don’t get the expected response. It seems to create a certain amount of hesitation—and not like the hesitation before your first kiss; more like the hesitation before you try to explain why something is broken. But the other part is that we’re actually attempting to speak a slightly different form of the language.

Much earlier in the development of speech recognition, I might have said that it was like having to speak pidgin English: a stripped-down version of English with a laser-focused vocabulary and non-existent grammar. But we’re happily beyond that now, so if it’s not a pidgin, what is it?

I think it’s actually an issue of register. A register is a specific way of using a language appropriate to the situation you are in—especially when talking to people with a higher or lower social status. Some languages have extremely elaborate registers that rely on entirely separate vocabularies. English is much less complicated and much more permissive, but still: there’s the way that we talk to our friends when we’re hanging out (casual register) that’s different than when we talk to the judge when we’re in traffic court (consultative register). We are affecting a register of sorts when we pretend to speak like Shakespeare: “Whither goest thou? Mayhaps thou hath partaken too much of thine cucumber sandwiches?”

When we’re giving instructions or asking questions of our smart devices, we hesitate in part because we’re trying to speak in a recently developed ‘device register’ that we haven’t learned growing up, so we don’t really know the rules or the limits—and it might change with the next firmware update. For now it seems to fall somewhere between talking with friends at a café, traffic court and asking HAL to open the pod bay doors. Repeatedly.