The voice of the underworld: Magical and political narratives of the smart speaker

This essay interrogates the use of language in describing machine learning-enabled smart speakers and voice assistants, such as the Amazon Echo and its Alexa technology, arguing that particular dominant narratives obfuscate the deeper function of these devices, an obfuscation compounded by the limits of access inherent to their design and operation.

This critique will begin by assessing claims made by powerful actors in the smart speaker market regarding these technologies, and how choices in their language can be seen to strategically endow these devices with near-supernatural capacities. Using Judith Williamson’s study of magic as a referent system in advertising, this language will be argued to conjure promissory visions that compound the limits of access inherent to these devices, and the practices of data exploitation and attempts at market dominance this serves.

As a propositional response to these conditions, I will examine my own installation artwork The Dark Age of Connectionism: Captivity, which explores the machinic voice in both textto-speech and speech-to-text technologies, as an intervention upon the narratives examined in this essay. Through this, I will demonstrate the value in challenging these conditions, and how such challenges offer new avenues for knowledge production in this context.

I will conclude by arguing that, when interrogating these technologies and the limits of access inherent to them, language is s particularly potent both as a site of examination, and as a tool in critical artistic practice.