Natalie Jeremijenko, "If Things Can Talk, What Do They Say? If We Can Talk to Things, What Do We Say?" electronic book review (2005).
Voice Chips and their newer partners, speech recognition chips, are small low power silicon chips that synthesize voice, play prerecorded voice messages, or recognize voice commands. Although this functionality is not new, what makes voice chips unique is that they are small and cheap enough to be deployed in many, in fact almost any, product. Sprinkled throughout the technosocial landscape, their presence in products is a (not quite arbitrary) sampling mechanism, and enables us to compare very different products. So their secondary function, the concern of this essay, is as a simple instrument to slice through the history of our attempts to swap attributes with machines and be able to understand the nuances of complex sociotechnical systems -- precisely because the systems are rendered in the form in which we can best recognize nuance: English, be it our own or the machines'....
The question we begin with is simply, when things can talk, what do they say?
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