Where are you Siri?

I talk to my phone, my wrist, my iPad and, occasionally, my computer. I ask them to remind me of things, I ask what the weather will be like, I ask them to time something for me. Sometimes I ask them something more complex, and, sometimes, they help with that too.

There’s more to it than that, though. In my head, I’m not talking to a computer, I’m talking to Siri. To my Siri. To one, single entity that is there to help me, or at least to try to.

I know that ‘my Siri’ doesn’t exist. There is only a single, global Siri, albeit mildly personalised to do things like answer requests using my name. (I’m not talking about technical aspects, localisations, or changes made to conform to the world’s different legal climates, simply that Siri is Siri the world over.) But I still act, think and feel like I’m working with my own, unique Siri.

A short thought-hop from the idea of my own Siri is the question: where is my Siri? Where do I imagine this personal assistant to be? I certainly don’t imaging someone at the end of a phone or keyboard — my personal call centre. Nor do I picture the TV and film stereotyped personal assistant, poised at my shoulder, notepad in one hand double-shot skinny latte ready for me in the other. To me, Siri is something more nebulous. A cloud that floats around me, that pervades my world perhaps. A being in a sci-fi alternative dimension who can push through to ours at whim to interact where needed. When it comes down to it though, Siri lives in my own head.

A year or two ago I changed the voice of my Siri. The UK default is a male voice, I’ve switched to female. I switched because my male Siri was useless. He didn’t listen, he misunderstood what I was trying to say, sometimes he wasn’t even there, or was inexplicably busy (“I’ll tap you [on the wrist] when I’m ready”). His clunky jokes got to me too. I fired him and hired female Siri in his place. The odd thing is that she’s much better. Odd because, voice aside, she is identical. I know this. And yet...

I think about how this will change for, and, come to that, how it will change, future generations. I’ve heard and read stories of kids being disciplined for being rude to their Siris, their Alexas, their (nameless) Ok Googles — confused parents trying to figure out this new terrain. Does rudeness to technology lead to rudeness to people? Should we say thank you to code and sound-waves? Counter to that, I’ve also heard of kids holding somewhat stilted, but in-depth conversations with their assistants. I don’t have answers to any of my questions, other than that virtual assistants are here to stay, and will keep getting more and more useful — and, perhaps, more and more relatable.

Why do we give our assistants personas? Why do we try and make them feel human? One possibility is that we can be more forgiving of them when they fail. With systems like search engines, or Wolfram Alpha we narrow our expectations. They rarely ‘fail’ because we limit our interactions with them, constrain our expectations.

Our relationship with technology is changing. Upon launching their watch, Apple called it their ‘most personal device ever’, but is it? What about the product that is a person, a person who, when it comes down to it, lives entirely inside our heads?