People Are Starting to Realize How Voice Assistants Actually Work

Technology, and especially voice technology, has normalized some bizarre behaviors. It can be hard to remember that summoning Alexa or Siri by speaking to a watch, a blank screen, or a speaker two rooms away was eerie in the beginning, like almost any exercise that requires communicating with the unseen. Perhaps because voice assistants are invisible, we accepted the idea that the artificial intelligence powering them worked like magic, independently responding to our commands without human intervention.