Something You Should Know - Real Solutions for Everyday Anxiety & The Evolution of Talking Computers
Episode Date: May 29, 2025It is hard to imagine how intricate and complicated your eyes are. This episode starts with a look at some of the amazing things your eyes do and how they work to allow you to see the world. https://...www.buzzfeed.com/acuvue/impossibly-cool-facts-you-may-not-know-about-yo#.kjpwxlkvO Anxiety is a huge problem. It appears more people are more anxious today than ever before. Why is that? What causes anxiety in the first place and more importantly, what can you do to lower your anxiety? Here with some wonderful insight into all of this as well as offering very practical suggestions to reduce anxiety is Martha Beck. She is a Harvard-trained sociologist and speaker who is the author of a book called Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose (https://amzn.to/4dyqWRV) For decades, science fiction has given us various versions of talking computers. And today we have Alexa and Siri that utilize pretty cool technology that allows you to speak a question and hear an answer back. But talking machines go back a long time and their history is fascinating. And what is the future of talking computers and machines? Have they reached their potential or is there more to come? Listen to my guest Sarah A. Bell. She is a writer and professor who studies the impact of information technologies on the world. She is author of the book, Vox ex Machina: A Cultural History of Talking Machines (https://amzn.to/4k8FfyU) We all know the importance of frequent handwashing. Still there are a few things many of us unknowingly get wrong that can put us at risk of catching or spreading germs. Listen as I explain what they are. https://www.foxnews.com/health/biggest-handwashing-mistakes-could-increase-germs-viruses PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! MINT MOBILE: Ditch overpriced wireless and get 3 months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month at https://MintMobile.com/something ! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure! Go to https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING ROCKET MONEY: Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster! Go to https://RocketMoney.com/SOMETHING QUINCE: Elevate your shopping with Quince! Go to https://Quince.com/sysk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! DELL: The power of Dell AI with Intel inside is transforming the world of pro sports! For the players and the fans who are there for every game. See how Dell Technologies with Intel inside can help find your advantage, and power your wins at https://Dell.com/Wins Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Today on Something You Should Know,
you won't believe all the incredible things
your eyes can do.
Then how to deal with anxiety, which
has become a huge problem.
Anxiety is increasing dramatically.
It went up 25 percent during the pandemic and then didn't come back down again, just
kept growing.
And half of young adults are suffering from crippling anxiety and it just keeps going
up.
Also, what many people still get wrong about washing their hands and the fascinating history
and future of voice computing.
And is the voice of Alexa the voice of a real person?
So they did start out with someone who recorded basically lots of nonsense and then the algorithms
join the individual pieces.
It really is a kind of creative synthesis if you like.
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Something you should know. Fascinating Intel. the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Do you have limbo rings in your eyes?
If you do, lucky you.
And I'll tell you why.
Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers.
Welcome to Something You Should Know.
And we start today with your eyes, some fascinating things about your eyes.
According to studies, limbal rings can make you appear more attractive.
The limbal ring is the dark, round circle around your iris in your eye.
Some people have them, some people don't.
And apparently, you're more likely to develop a crush on someone who shows prominent limbal
rings.
The eye muscle is the fastest reacting muscle in your entire body.
It contracts in less than one one hundredth of a second. There are approximately seven million cones and a hundred and thirty
million rods in your retina that respond to light and they help you determine
color and detail. Around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago everybody had brown eyes. Then the first blue-eyed baby was born,
and now all blue-eyed people are related
to that first baby and to each other.
Your eyes can see about 10 million different colors,
but if you were part of the 1% of women
with a rare genetic mutation,
you'd be able to see 100 million colors.
Both sides of both parents' families can all have brown eyes and still produce a blue-eyed
baby.
And your eye color isn't set until you're about two years old.
And that is something you should know.
Fear and An. You often hear those two words mentioned together a lot.
Sometimes they're used interchangeably, but they are different. Well, fear is a
good thing in that it helps keep us safe, where anxiety is not as useful. Yet a lot
of people spend a lot of time in an anxious state, worrying.
And what's wrong with that? Well, listen to my guest, Martha Beck. She's a Harvard-trained
sociologist and speaker who is the author of a book called Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity,
Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose. Hi, Martha. Welcome to Something You Should
Know.
Hi, Mike. It's an welcome to something you should know. Hi Mike, it's an honor
to be here. So first explain a little better and a little deeper the
difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is a highly energized response to a
clear and present physical danger. All animals feel fear and it's necessary for
our survival. We would walk right into traffic if we didn't have it and it gives us a bolt of adrenaline and then
if we get away from the danger it subsides. That's the way it happens in
all animals except humans. But humans have the ability to take that initial
fear even if there wasn't a scary situation. We can imagine one and
that creates a kind of ghost in our minds. We keep telling
stories to ourselves about the reasons we should be afraid and we should be cautious,
and that feeds into the primitive parts of the brain as an actual physical danger. So for us,
the fear response never subsides. It goes on and on and on, even when we're perfectly safe.
never subsides, it goes on and on and on, even when we're perfectly safe.
Well, I've never really thought of it that way,
but when I think of an animal, like a dog, say,
and you see a dog become afraid, become fearful,
but when the danger leaves, you don't see the dog sitting
around pondering, you know, when's it going to happen again
and what else could go wrong?
You know, it deals with the fear and moves on.
No, I have watched in Africa, I've watched an antelope be chased by a lion and the lion gives up.
And then the antelope notices that the lion gave up and goes immediately back into a state of calm and just starts eating with the lion still
pretty nearby.
So yeah, our systems are meant to heal and relax
when we're not in danger,
so that when danger comes,
we'll have the capacity and the stored up energy to respond.
Anxiety bleeds that out of us.
So it makes us afraid all the time
and takes away the only beneficial use of fear.
Well, that's really stupid.
No kidding.
That's really stupid. Where is
anxiety's place in the world? Is anxiety becoming a bigger problem? Has it always
been a problem? Where are we with it? It's getting much much worse. So 300 years
ago we would have woken to hear water running,
wind and trees, birdsong.
There's a study I just read that shows that birdsong
is incredibly helpful to us.
We would have lived among trees and plants,
and the pheromones from those trees and plants
actually affect our health.
So if you go into a forest within a few hours,
your cancer-killing cells triple.
There are all these ways we evolved
to be in a certain state of being
and humans lived there for hundreds of thousands of years.
Now we wake up and we hear bad news
when we see it on our phones.
Then we get up and we rush to places
where we're trying to work competitively
with a group of strangers
instead of being at home among our loved ones there are all these social conditions that really feed
anxiety and as technology keeps developing the stories are spinning
faster and they're coming in harder and they're more outrageous and people are
yelling at each other online and then in the real world. And because of that, anxiety is increasing dramatically.
It went up 25% during the pandemic, 25%.
And then didn't come back down again, just kept growing.
It only goes one way when you're spinning stories
the way our culture does.
So it's now the leading mental health disease
or condition in the world.
And half of young adults are suffering from crippling anxiety.
And it just keeps going up.
I know people who seem anxious a lot of the time and I know people who are very go with the flow.
So what is that spectrum and who's on it where?
I think it has to do with how much,
well, it has several contributory forces,
like there's the amount of trauma
you've experienced in your life.
People who've experienced trauma
are more edgy and anxious all the time.
People with really high verbal skills
tend to be more anxious
because they're using the part of the brain,
the left hemisphere,
both for language and for fear. Because the storytelling capacity of that part of the brain is what allows us to be afraid when nothing dangerous is present, imagination. On the spectrum
of things, it's interesting you should use that phrase. I have a son with Down syndrome,
I have a son with Down syndrome who is the light of my life and he has been my teacher in how to not be anxious. He just had surgery to have a pacemaker inserted and I said are you in
pain? Afterward I'd say are you in pain? Are you worried? And he'd say why would I be? No, it's fine. And I would just, I'm amazed by his capacity
to simply be with what is,
and it has very much to do with the fact
that he's not particularly verbal.
So I see the very conditions that breed anxiety
being encouraged and in fact pushed really hard
by social forces in our particular culture.
And without that, I think people are much more willing to relax into that non-verbal space and
be present in nature, which is the optimal scenario for freeing yourself from anxiety.
Well, it seems that the way we typically handle anxiety is to basically try to squash it.
Calm down, relax, you'll be fine.
Stop being so anxious, which when you think about it,
that doesn't work.
It really doesn't.
So if you were to find a wet, shaky, timid little puppy
on your doorstep, a newborn puppy,
and you decided you were gonna try to help it,
what would you do?
I'm asking this in real time,
what would you, Mike, do if you found a puppy like this?
Well, of course you would comfort it,
you would pet it, you would talk softly to it,
you would do, just as I would do when my dog,
when lightning and thunder is outside
and the dog is going nuts
because he gets so anxious from that,
you don't yell at it, tell it to calm down,
you comfort it.
Exactly.
And if I told you,
if you were in the middle of a panicky situation,
calm down, you couldn't.
But if I said to you,
even if you were in a really strong, frightening environment,
something that was really making you anxious or even fearful, and you were trying to protect
that animal, I could say, be kind.
And even if you were still scared, you could operationalize that.
You know how to be kind to an animal.
And as I've worked with people, I've realized that the step between anxiety and creativity is actually the
absolutely most important. And it's also the step people don't
think is that it sort of blends into the background, people are
all excited about creativity. But to get to creativity, what
you need is kindness. You need kindness to the part of yourself that is anxious.
So give me an example of how to do that.
Okay, so anytime you're feeling something,
you know, you can't sleep or you're being audited
or you're worried about your relationship
or whatever it is, treat it, treat that part of yourself,
the part that is frightened,
exactly as you would treat a small frightened animal.
So sometimes I actually have people
put a hand on their own chest and just press gently.
That really triggers a sense of comfort in the brain.
And then do what you just described doing
for a little frightened animal.
Lower the tone, the volume, and the pitch
of your voice. Say comforting things, not because this part of your brain
understands them, it doesn't, but because the sound itself and the intention is
clear. So say to yourself simple things like, it's okay, I've got you, don't worry,
tell me everything.
You get to feel exactly the way you're feeling right now.
I'm just here with you, you got this.
And I also ask people to use this phrasing
from Tibetan meditation.
It's called loving kindness meditation.
And it starts with may you.
May you be well, may you be happy may
you be free and protected may you have ease in your life may you feel loved may you feel known
may you feel held may it fill and you just keep offering and offering and offering these kind wishes
and what that's doing neurologically is moving you out of the
place of anxiety and into the place of compassion. That's what shifts the
balance between anxiety and creativity. If kindness persists the anxiety relaxes
and in the space where it used to be creativity arises in ways that will blow
your mind and life becomes a joyride.
Well, I have to know how to do that because who wouldn't want their life to be a joyride?
I'm speaking with Martha Beck. She is author of the book Beyond Anxiety.
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bmo.com slash VI Porter to learn more. So Martha, you were saying if we do what you're talking about,
life becomes a joyride. So explain how my life can become a joyride.
I was studying this during the pandemic,
during the lockdown.
And I thought this is a great chance
to run an experiment on myself.
Every day I'm gonna get up and perform tasks
of some kind that require me to use
the right side of my brain, the creative side of my brain.
And this is not just creativity as in the arts. You're being creative when you make a sandwich or put together an outfit for the
day or you know go a new way to work or something. We're always creating, creating, creating.
So I decided I knew because I used to be a teaching fellow in the art department at Harvard.
I knew we had used a book called
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,
and we really, really focused on helping students
activate their right hemispheres.
So I started doing that.
I'd get up every day and start drawing.
And I thought, I'll just see what happens.
I'm gonna do this for a month.
I'll see where I go from here.
Well, I didn't go anywhere from there.
I just started drawing 20 hours a day.
And it was like this childlike part of myself
had been kept in a cage and the joy
and the absolute thrill I was getting.
I didn't keep any of this art.
I mean, it wasn't great art.
It was the doing of it and the freedom to just be creative.
Wow, but the effect of anxiety is to block part of the brain
while the effect of creativity is to include the whole brain.
And I started to feel as if I were fully alive
for the first time since childhood.
And that has sustained.
So put that in a real life example,
like so you're feeling anxious, go make a sandwich.
I mean that's not the...
I bet a lot of people do that.
So the first thing is remember, I use the acronym CAT, K-A-T, not C-A-T.
CAT stands for kindness, art activity, and then transcendence.
The first part, the K is kindness,
just as I've described it in the last few minutes.
Put your hand on your chest,
give yourself room to breathe,
take deep breaths in and out,
relax your mind as much as you can,
and offer yourself kind wishes
until the anxiety starts to abate.
If you do that, and sometimes you'll,
I would, if I were working with a
client that might be their only assignment every day for a month or two
months it is so crucial to learn to be kind to ourselves and culturally we are
not taught or encouraged to be kind to ourselves so focus on that first. If you
start to feel the effects of kindness you will begin to think about
things you could change or make. So when people are in a tough situation I ask
them to shift from asking what can I do what should I do what will I do to what
can I make what should I make what will I make and you start thinking about ways
you could rearrange the world.
It often starts when I'm working with clients with them rearranging their furniture
or getting their hair cut differently or something like that.
These are acts of creativity.
And then if they continue to be kind to themselves,
they end up creating amazing things.
Whatever your deepest passions are,
if you're kind enough to yourself,
they will start to
arise and make stuff. And the T in KAT stands for transcendence and that you
don't have to do. If you can be kind consistently and you allow whatever
impulses come up to be enacted and you actually go and do things that you want
to. I call this making a sanity quilt out of your life. It's not a crazy quilt
which means lots of weird pieces sewn together. It's you taking the things you
love most and so and putting them together as the center of your attention.
Maybe not your time but your attention goes to things you love and then
eventually and it doesn't even take very long,
you reach a point where you find your purpose.
Frederick Boeckner, the theologian, said,
your mission in life is where your deep gladness
and the world's deep hunger meet.
And that's what happens,
I've worked with thousands of clients, and when they do get calm, in those calm and creative moments,
they always end up finding a place where their deep gladness
and the world's deep hunger meet.
But as long as we're anxious, we can't know our deep gladness.
Is this mostly, you know, like a first aid approach,
like when you're anxious, or is there some sort of long-term effect,
or can you do this?
Can you practice this in non anxious moments and it offers help when you are anxious?
Both actually. You can get a little emergency kit,
like your little emergency kit for when you're anxious and it can use the little exercises
I've been talking about here. It Turns out if you write about your anxiety it really
helps it abate. People who've been through a trauma and draw for a few
minutes about the trauma they just draw something they don't have to be
artistic but they have a much lower incidence of PTSD 80% less PTSD. So it's very much a first aid kit.
And once the calm starts to settle, and it will,
in the kindness, you will go back to your relaxed state,
the way an animal's system goes back.
We re-regulate the nervous system
so it's in a place of continuous rest,
which is very generative.
Our brains are always making something.
Mostly we're trained to make scary stories and then obey them.
But when we don't make scary stories,
when we're actually looking at the things that make us feel curious and interested and excited,
it becomes a way of life.
In the 60ss NASA commissioned a study
to detect creative geniuses so it could hire them.
And they gave this test to a bunch
of highly educated adults,
and 2% of them scored like creative geniuses.
So this went on for a while,
and then someone thought to give the same test
to four and five year olds.
Ninety-eight percent of them scored as creative geniuses.
When we and the researchers blamed socialization, we get socialized out of our creative genius.
But that can be reversed.
And the thing is, it's not becoming creative.
It's returning to the creative genius state that was born into us.
And I believe we all have it.
What do you mean?
Explain what you mean by we're mostly trained to make scary stories and obey them.
Okay, so look at the news, look at it, scroll through your phone, talk to people.
Let's take the algorithms online.
Whatever gets the most attention gets repeated.
So if the algorithm sees that you are looking
at a certain subject for a longer period of time,
it will give you more stories like that.
The brain has something called a negativity bias.
I call it the 15 puppies and a cobra syndrome.
If you went into a room that contained 15 golden retriever puppies and one cobra,
you would be focused on the cobra. And because of this, this helps keep us alive, obviously,
but humans get stuck in the negativity bias. And that means we're sort of spinning around and then
we pay really close attention to things that scare us. So that's why they say in journalism,
if it bleeds, it leads.
It's why we slow down to gawk at accidents
because the brain is equipped to be fascinated
by dangerous things to learn from them how to survive.
So what's meant to be a momentary alarm followed by peace
becomes a momentary alarm followed by peace becomes a momentary alarm followed
by 19 different news stories about disaster, which causes the algorithms around us to bring
in more stories that scare us because that's what we're spending the most attention on.
And these are not happening to us.
This can all happen while you're sitting in a chair. How do other people mitigate my anxiety?
In other words, it seems like one of anxiety's best friends is solitude,
because then you can convince yourself of anything,
because no one's telling you you're wrong.
That's right. So how does having people around you help mitigate these negative things?
The most horrifying thing to me about our present situation historically is that there are sad,
disaffected people who can sit alone in their rooms and get into conversations with other people
who are alone and anxious and they
start to feed each other's anxiety and create these little silos of anxiety, which have
been shown by the way to cause more loneliness in the long run.
But if you take a person who's very anxious and you take them into, let's say you take
them, you go to a play on Broadway or something, and there's an astonishing display of human creativity,
music, beautiful people, beautiful lights,
beautiful everything.
It can simply stop anxiety in its tracks.
And the feeling of anxiety being stopped in its tracks
is awe.
I just mentioned my son,
and when he had his pacemaker put in.
He had, there was a moment when he flatlined.
His heart went to zero beats per minute.
And of course I was gonna be very anxious,
but I didn't have time.
I called for a doctor, but before I even finished,
all these nurses and doctors burst into the room
and they started, they had the paddles
and they had all the things.
And I stood in the hallway watching them through an open door, just sobbing.
And somebody came up and said, this is so traumatic for you.
And I said, no, I'm in awe of the love that these people have for a complete stranger
with Down syndrome. I am in awe of the human capacity for invention, for technology, and most of all for love.
That just stops you when you see it.
And you realize that being anxious is to throw away your life.
It's much more important to stay with what brings awe.
Great.
Well, this is a wonderful conversation, Martha, and I feel less anxious for having it. I've been
speaking with Martha Beck. She is a Harvard-trained sociologist and speaker
and author of the book Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your
Life's Purpose, and there's a link to her book in the show notes. Great job, Martha.
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The primary way we communicate with a computer
is we type on a keyboard.
You type what you wanna say say. Now if you've ever
watched the original Star Trek TV series where Captain Kirk or Scotty would, they
would just talk to their computers. They would stand in a room and say, computer
set the course for wherever the destination was. And that idea of just
talking to a computer seemed pretty far-fetched.
Today, while we still type a lot to communicate with computers, we do have things like Alexa and
Siri, and there continues to be a push for computers and devices that we simply talk to
rather than type to. So where did the idea of talking to machines start?
Are we all going to just talk to computers in the future
and they're just gonna talk back to us?
Could this replace some human conversations?
And what are the implications of that?
Because when you talk to Alexa or Siri,
it sort of feels like you're talking to a person.
Here to discuss this is Sarah Bell.
She is a writer and professor who studies the impacts
of information technologies on society.
And she's author of a book called,
Vox Ex Machina, A Cultural History of Talking Machines.
Hi Sarah, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Hi Mike, thanks for having me.
So the idea of talking to a computer and it talking back shows up in movies and TV shows
and probably in books and things.
So the idea has been something people have thought about for a long time.
Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I feel like that idea, that kind of dream of having a machine you can communicate with
even goes back before we had computers. Even in the sort of age of enlightenment, when
the scientific revolution started up in the 18th century, there were ideas about making
machinery mimic human beings. And that was basically everything a human being could do, including talking.
Of course, it didn't work very well and the machines couldn't interpret speech.
So there was no hearing in that situation.
But people carried that through and really, you know, the beginning of the telegraph and
then the telephone,
even before computers is all about this sort of dream
of being able to interact with machines
that are as much like us as we can kind of make them.
So the first, what you would consider
talking machine thing in the modern era was what?
So I start with machine in the modern era was what? So I start with a machine in the 1930s called the Voter, which
stood for voice demonstrator.
And I start with that machine because it
is electromechanic, because as soon
as you add electricity to machinery,
then things really take off.
And that's when we start getting,
in just a few years after that, during World War II, electric computers and so forth.
So I start with that machine, which was just a demonstrator, like it was called. It was
created by AT&T, the phone company, their Bell Labs research arm. And it was on display
at the 1939 World's Fair. So millions of people saw it or heard it.
It was also on the radio.
It was promoted in magazines.
It was actually quite famous for a short period of time.
And so lots of people knew about it.
But it is kind of the beginning, even pre-computer
at that point, of electronic speech synthesis.
What was it demonstrating? is kind of the beginning, even pre-computer at that point, of electronic speech synthesis.
What was it demonstrating?
It was demonstrating speech. So interestingly, like AT&T had lots of exhibits at their pavilion
at this World's Fair. One of the most, I think, well attended and exciting for many people was AT&T was actually
giving away long distance phone calls every day and then the audience could listen in
to people actually making long distance phone calls.
And I only bring that up because that kind of tells you how new this idea of speaking
to anyone through a wire was.
I mean, 1930s and we've still,
people have never heard a long distance telephone call.
It's too new and it's too expensive really for them.
And so this was really supposed to be a demonstration
of just how scientific AT&T was
and how cutting edge they were
and they were doing all these things
and they could even make a machine talk,
which made all the headlines at the time in the
newspapers and so forth.
And the voice of the machine was what?
Well, it was described as having an electronic accent, but it was created out of basically
the kind of hiss of electricity running through some filters and so forth.
And it was manipulated by a woman.
They were all women sitting at something that looked kind of like a little organ,
a little playable organ with about a couple dozen keys.
And so she manipulated that electronic hiss through those filters
to create the different sounds of speech.
Each of these women, they had to practice
for almost a year actually to get the machine
to actually elicit recognizable speech.
So today we have things like Siri and Alexa
and those are seemingly very sophisticated
in the sense that you can just talk and get a response.
And what is that technology?
So that is a combination of speech synthesis,
which is taking, at this stage,
it's actually taking little teeny tiny bits
of cut up speech and using some computer algorithms to join them together.
And that's called concatenative synthesis, fancy word, that just means they've been kind of glued together.
And that's one side of it, but the other side is speech recognition.
And that actually took a lot longer to create and that is a statistical process where kind of in reverse, the machine looks at the
speech pattern and figures out statistically what the sound is most likely to be. But the thing that
made speech synthesis the interface that we know it today, in other words Siri and Alexa, those
things that we can talk to,
is the combination of not just the synthesis or what the Alexa voice sounds like, but also our ability, as you say, to speak and be understood by that technology, that piece of software.
Is the voice of Alexa and Siri, are those real people or is that all created in a computer somewhere?
It's actually a combination. So I would say that some of the sounds are probably very unique to the
system itself. In other words, if you, so they did start out with someone who recorded basically
lots of nonsense and then the software actually cuts that all up into little pieces.
Like I said, those algorithms join the individual pieces.
It starts out as a person,
but probably if you heard the voice of Siri speak,
you may or may not actually recognize
the human person as the voice of Siri because it really
is a creative synthesis,
if you like.
And so when I ask a question of Alexa or Siri,
I speak my question and I get an answer back.
What happened in the middle?
I get that I spoke into the machine,
the machine spoke back to me,
but what happened in the middle to make all that happen?
That's a good question.
Lots of computer processing,
because not only did the program need to recognize the,
it's basically a speech to text kind of pattern.
So it recognizes the words that you used,
it puts them in a text stream that
the computer can understand. And then it looks for those text patterns in its databases,
which is one of the reasons that I don't know how much you interact with Alexa, but with the Alexa that we have in our house,
one of the main, what we call a fallback
that we get from Alexa is, hmm, I'm not sure about that.
Because if it doesn't, if it's not able to quickly put that
through a text database and find some kind of answer,
then it's going to default to the phrase like that where it tells you that it doesn't understand.
The other thing that it often does is say,
I found something on the web.
That's the other default database where it will actually take
the first web results and read it to you as a text to speech.
So it's speech to text and then text to speech.
It kind of goes in both directions in that interaction.
Is any of the technology that this speech synthesis stuff
is today like Alexa and Siri and well,
what else is there besides Alexa and Siri I
mean is is speech very much a consumer thing because people are lazy lazy and
they just want to ask for Alexa to tell them the time rather than go find a
clock I mean is that what it's for or is is mastering this speech stuff really
gonna propel us into the future?
I mean, that's an excellent question. I've never, you know, I do history.
I've never considered myself much of a futurist, but history can tell us something about
the patterns that we can expect to see. If we look back at the history of both speech synthesis and speech recognition. One of the threads of research
happened to be for the purpose of creating a text-to-speech machine for folks who were
blind or maybe had disabilities of their speech organs or something like that. And so there certainly are incredible uses for folks who need to interact with computers in certain ways.
And of course, most of us need to interact with computers
in this day and age, but as many things go,
the thrust of development is always towards things
that you can make money off of.
And so a lot of those applications, of course, are consumer applications like Alexa.
Interestingly, I don't know if people can even remember back this far, but right before
chat GPT went public at the end of what was that, 2022, Amazon had largely cut their Alexa team.
And part of that was because I think, and this is just, I don't know, there's a little
bit of research about this, but we know that people were mostly using it, like you said,
to ask for the time, to have it play music, to ask it what the weather was, maybe to ask
about its stock quotes, but not anything that was really valuable to Amazon. But then we got large language models in the public. And so in the last two
years, there's been a push again, to make speech the interface of our interactions with
those large language models. And I don't know where that will take us, to be honest. But
we see kind of the same things recur
that have recurred for the last 60, 70 years
and that we've been told they are the answer
to things like a lot of our health related issues.
So promoting elder care and that kind of thing,
or our educational issues.
So to make education more interactive with children using these kinds of
programs. And this is supposed to offload labor from people like teachers and nurses and so on
and so forth. I'm a little skeptical, you might hear that in my voice, I'm a little skeptical about
some of those applications. But I will say that with computing, with areas of computing, we've actually
seen those promises over and over again since the 1950s.
Well, as you say, if you can't make money on it,
there's not much point in developing it.
But because it's a voice, it synthesizes the human voice,
there does seem to be some potential there, right?
Therapy, for example, through chatbots,
that's also something that's gone way back to the 60s
that has caused a lot of controversy, right,
about having your therapist not be a computer program,
basically, rather than a person.
But I think they'll probably keep working on it.
We see a lot of hype about people having relationships with these chat
bots. I still, when I play with them, I find them to be a little too brittle for that. I feel like
I can still tell very, very quickly that it's not a thing that I can really engage in any kind of creative conversation. So time will tell about some of that.
I think hopefully as the public,
we're looking at some of these technologies
with a highly critical eye and thinking,
what are the pro-social applications
and what are those applications that maybe
we kind of wanna stay away from that would turn
out to have some unintended consequences that we might not
like very much?
So you mentioned that the original Siri and maybe Alexa
were actual real people talking nonsense.
But today, when I watch these videos
where people don't want to use their own voice
so they have a voice, a voice
basically read it for them. I have this suspicion that these are not real people voices doing what you had described earlier of taking little bits and pieces, that these are totally created voices.
Am I right? I think for the most part, yeah, we're getting to the stage where, so there have been iterations
of speech synthesis, of course, through this, you know, 100, basically 100 years of history.
And people have tried different ways to create the speech. And it's always been dependent on
how much computing power really was available to people in a cost-effective way. And I think we've gotten to a point,
just like the large language models, where there's so much data stored, that instead of having that
voice bank of individual recordings that I spoke about earlier, like you were saying, the human who
recorded all of the nonsense for Siri, that those little pieces are being identified statistically
and picked out of that giant database of speech that exists.
One thing that we know about Alexa,
if you use any of the Echo devices,
we were told at the end of March by the company, of course, that
they would be recording everything at that time.
They are expanding the database of speech that they have to pull from and then create
synthetically and statistically.
I keep using that word, but that's because I think a lot of people don't think very much about what's behind these processes.
And it's not a person, right?
It's not a, in my view, it's not anything sentient or cognizant.
It is a mathematical process where there's very large, very fast computing power that
can go through all of this data and pull out what it needs and put it together very rapidly.
But it's still a computational process and not a person
or a wizard behind the curtain, so to speak.
Do we know, and I don't know if this is something
that you've looked into,
but when you're using voice technology,
when you're interacting with something
that's talking back to you
Does the voice matter in other words on Google Maps? You can you can have the lady with the British accent or you can have the guy or you can have a man with an American accent
or like
Does that matter or it's just a preference?
That is an excellent question. I would argue that it probably does matter.
It starts out as a preference and depending on how much
we interact with these products.
One time I mentioned this in the book,
this is in the Guinness World of Records.
Before Google Maps was
our default geographic information system.
The most popular, most downloaded sat-nav voice was Dan Castellaneta's Homer Simpson
character.
People wanted Homer Simpson as their sat-nav voice.
That's kind of interesting.
But in some ways, these products definitely fulfill or establish some of the stereotypes that we
already have about voices.
I was just reading a paper, for example, about a team that's trying to make a cute anime
voice even cuter. That was the word they were using. Because the people, quite frankly,
it's largely young men who use this voice, as you say,
like they choose it for their programs and so forth. They want it to sound a certain
way. And but what does that mean for their interactions with other people who don't have
that kind of cute voice, right?
The voice of Alexa, for example, it's a very soothing, pleasant voice that someone decided
this is the voice of Alexa because it's soothing and pleasant.
But if she was like a real jerk, you know, if she, what do you,
oh, you again, what do you want now?
You know, the interactions would be very different
because she was being jerky.
Like there is something to the subjectiveness of the voice itself
that either makes the interaction pleasant
and then likely to encourage more or not.
And I wonder like how much of the equation is that?
Like, let's get a voice that does this.
Yeah, very much.
There's a lot of at least starting with the like in the 80s and 90s,
there was quite a bit of communication and
psychological research done, especially out of the speech lab, the communication lab at
Stanford University.
In the 80s and 90s, they were really doing a lot of research.
And a lot of that research was exactly what you're talking about.
What kind of voice appeals to what kind of people.
And so the reason that we have something like Alexa, as you say, is a kind of soothing female voice, non-threatening is for whatever reason.
And some people argue that it's actually, you know, something that we get from like
just having a mother or, you know, some people will say it's kind of inborn and other people
will say that it's enculturated. And either way,
it's very true that for certain applications, people definitely showed a preference for
that kind of female voice in certain applications. And then there were other applications like
back in the 80s, in the day of the talking car, there were several automakers who tried
to add speech to cars. And people didn't like a woman's voice telling them that their oil needed changed, for example.
And so what are we supposed to take from all of this? What's your big so what here?
To remember and to recognize that they are the products of corporations.
To remember that for everything that they make easier for us,
they are also probably making something a little bit more difficult.
So for example, I think one of the reasons a lot of people just ask Alexa for the time
and to be the DJ and for the weather is because when you ask Alexa something else, you don't get all of the choices that you might get
by asking an informational question, even on the internet, right, where you would get lots of
web search answers. And so it also sort of reduces some of our experience. And I would just like
people to think about both of those, both the opportunities and also the way it kind of reduces
our experience with other people.
Well, what you just said, you know, I hadn't really thought about much before,
but when you talk to Alexa and ask for information,
you pretty much get one thing.
Whereas if you do it on a computer, you will get if you search Google,
you'll get a whole list of possible things to look at.
And just the fact that it's one thing versus a multitude
of things holds that technology back a bit.
I've been speaking with Sarah Bell.
She is author of the book Vox Ex Machina,
A Cultural History of Talking Machines.
And there is a link to that book in the show notes.
Sarah, thanks for being here.
I think we've all had it drilled into us,
how important it is to wash your hands,
how it helps keep you from getting sick
and how it prevents spreading illness to others.
But there's some interesting research that points out
a lot of us still aren't getting it right.
For example, you shouldn't really rely on a hand sanitizer as a substitute for washing
your hands.
Hand sanitizer doesn't kill everything.
For example, norovirus.
It's a highly contagious stomach virus that's very common on cruise ships and also spread
seasonally.
The virus cannot be killed with hand sanitizer,
but it is easily destroyed with soap and water. Not washing hands at critical
times. Most of us do wash our hands after using the bathroom or before we handle
food, but a lot of people forget to wash their hands after going to the grocery
store or a restaurant or the doctor's office or a pharmacy or a hospital. Also a lot of us report that we do wash our
hands more during the fall and winter and less so in the spring and summer. But
we shouldn't let up. Disease can be spread all year round so wash your hands
often and wash your hands for at least 20 seconds every time. That's the expert advice and that is something you should know.
If you found this episode of Something You Should Know interesting, entertaining, informative,
you could share your thoughts by writing a review and giving us a rating on whatever
platform you're listening on.
I'm Mike Herr-Rothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.
And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer and director.
You might know me from The League, Veep,
or my non eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.
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