Device Register Revisited

As I’ve mentioned before, talking to our devices can be tricky. That’s a relatively recent development; an older problem is how our devices talk to us. Siri and Alexa actually sound normal enough to not be jarring—if they correctly interpret our request—and I would expect that to continue to steadily improve.

But there’s still a need for getting printed communication right, and it seems there will “always” need to be a human to look closely at text rendered on the screen to help. A classic example for those of us of a certain age is the dreaded “syntax error” message of early computer systems. Frustrating and opaque, there is almost no information contained therein: the programmer may as well have left off the word “syntax” and just had the single word “error” displayed instead. It might have been less infuriating.

I spotted a somewhat more amusing example at a grocery store recently. At the self-checkout, the display admonished me to “Come on, Scan and Bag it!” This could be taken two different ways. One would be as enthusiastic encouragement to participate in the grocery shopping process; to get into the spirit of commerce and joyfully ring up those eggs, asparagus and bell peppers and get them into a bag so I can go home and make a frittata! Oh, boy!

But another reading might feel like you’ve been transported to a busier, perhaps slightly grittier grocery store, where even the machines are in a hurry. One might feel like the message to “Come on, Scan and Bag it!” could easily be followed by “I don’t have all day!” or “There’s other people in line, pal!”

The difference, of course, is tone, which isn’t something that our devices have a lot of flexibility with yet when they are speaking. (That will be an entirely different and possibly much more amusing chapter in voice assistant development.) But it’s also something that requires much more care any time that text is displayed that you might ordinarily simply say out loud. At a time that everyone is forming text messages exactly the same way they would speak, the mistaken assumption is that you know how I sound in my head just by the words I’m typing. Perhaps that’s why we lean on emoji to ensure the other person knows what we mean. ;)