(no subject)

[jack]

In the past, as everyone knows who's ever heard an old scifi film, an 80s voice synthesiser, or Stephen Hawking, or experimented when the first forays of automatic[1] text-to-speech came into mainstream operating systems, computer announcements were made by a robotic flattened voice. THAT-TALKED-LIKE-THIS-SEN-TENCE.

In the future, as everyone knows who's heard a recent scifi film, heard the computer voice in Command and Conquer or Portal, or (I hear) been to Japan, knows, computer announcements will be made by a pleasant polyphonic tonal but neutral female voice, the sort that projects beauty non-sexual beauty.

What I don't understand is why, in between, in the present, as anyone who had bought a cheap but functional Lexmark series 12XX printer knows, computer announcements are made by recordings of a self-satisfied sounding American[2]. Can it be the future already, please?

[1] Typo: automatical

[2] I don't really object, it just has an unpolished quality that makes me comment on it anyway. It sounds sufficiently like an actual American to draw attention, yet repeats exactly the same intonation, etc, reminding you it's artificial. Avoiding this is exactly how the future announcements are so good. But even if audible "printing is finished" announcements are actually a fairly good idea, I decided that if I cared enough to write a blog post

[3] Witness the lack of "one-liner" tag, for though this post contains one simple, brief, ungrandious idea, it runs to three paragraphs (six with footnotes), and you might say, "three paragraphs on a simple idea" is a normal ideal length of a post, rather than a thousand-word musing cut short :)

Comments

[naath.livejournal.com]

The printer has only a small number of phrases - so it's not really 'synthesiser', it might actually be a recording that only sounds artificial because it says the same thing in exactly the same way over and over.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exactly. This is definitely a recording. But I think it falls into an uncanny valley. It sounds like an actual self-confident American offering you advice on your printer. If it sounded less so, you'd feel less psychotic whenever it tells you to put in paper you already put in. If there were an ACTUAL self-confident American there, eventually he'd get the message that he wasn't being very accurate. But somewhere between is the most awkward compromise :)