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• This presentation summarises the research undertaken by the Hypervoice Consortium in 2014.
• Our goal was to explore the future of voice as computers join us in conversation
• We had the luxury to go away for six months, and both look at what is real and grounded, as well as to think big thoughts.
• We adopted an approach of thinking by first principles, not by analogies.
• Our thinking was grounded in our past experience and expertise:
– Kelly Fitzsimmons is an information security expert. Her company, HarQen, had created the world’s first ‘hypervoice’ conference calling service (shown on the next slide).
– Martin Geddes is a computer scientist and network performance expert, with a decade of research into voice and messaging.
– Lindsay Seabrook is a marketing consultant, empath and (unlike the two Gen Xers above) a ‘millennial’.
• Our ingoing hypothesis was that the future of voice would involve some kind of ‘super-improved’ conference call.
• We had a list of ten ways in which the experience might change.
• You can view the presentation we used to start the conversation with interviewees here.
Who?Founders
CEOs, CTOs, Chairman Managing Directors, Director
EVP & SVPs
Head of Innovation
Analysts
Chief Strategist
Mobile Design/ UI Expert
Head of Digital Inclusion
Product Managers
Professor of Virtual Reality
Professor of Speech Processing
AI Experts
Infosec experts
Unify
BT
Plantronics
SIP Forum
GSMA
KnowledgeVision
VoiceSage
Expect Labs
Venture Capital firms
University College London
Univ. of South Alabama Center for Forensics, IT and Security
University of Edinburgh
“In exploration,there needs to be the set of people who haveno rules, and they are going into the frontier.”
—David E. KaplanPhysicist, “Particle Fever”
• We took a fundamentally optimistic view of the future.
• The quality and quantity of human life on Earth has been rising substantially.
• We see no reason why progress should suddenly reverse in the near future, barring some cataclysmic event.
• Voice communication is integral to being human, and as such it will always be part of our ‘conversational DNA’.
• The idea that ‘voice is dead’ is tied to the decline of telephony, which is merely one format in which voice communication is packaged.
• There is a good case to be made that the speed of change is indeed increasing.
• As such, we are likely to see more change in the next ten years than we have seen in several decades.
• That means we need to take a quite radical stance in what is possible.
• We quickly realised that voice could not be seen in isolation from a wider context of a sensor and sense-making revolution.
• Voice is intimate bio-sensed data. It is a product of our bodies. This means it belongs with other sensed data like heart rate, skin conductivity, or joint motion.
Timeline…
Web 1.0
Hypertext
Web 2.0
Hypermessaging
Web 3.0
Hypersense
Hyperlinks Link Sharing Activity streams
• The future of voice is tied to fundamental advances in how we contextualise information.
• The 1990s saw the hypertext Web emerge.
• The 2000s added in timelines and gave messages URLs. Social media is really ‘hypermessaging’.
• The 2010s are about adding sensed data types; ‘hypersense’ relates information to its physical context using activity streams.
“The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says itcan't be done isgenerally interrupted by someone doing it.”
— Elbert Hubbard,Writer & Philosopher
• Our vision was myopic: the ‘end-of-history illusion’ had tricked us into a linear extrapolation of the past in a super-linear world.
• We needed to get far more radical!
To see further we had to look to edge cultures
HACKER
DISABLED
GENER-ATIONS
GAMER
“Mainstream”(10 years away)
To see further we had to look to edge cultures
HACKER
DISABLED
GENER-ATIONS
GAMER
“Mainstream”(10 years away)
• Jane McGonigal describes the feeling state that drives people to play games.
• There is a reward of ‘epic wins’, but between those you experience highly meaningful teamwork.
• This work that is so intrinsically rewarding that you want to do as much of it as possible. There’s no email or calendaring or traditional meetings.
• People are even willing to pay to do this work!
• The old and the young have an intolerance of complexity, and require extreme simplicity of UI/UX.
• They are motivated by the outcome, not the interaction with the mechanism. There has to be a clear answer to “why should I engage with this?”.
• Adding clutter and complexity drives these demographics away from technology. It’s all about what we can safely (and possibly magically) remove from the experience.
• There is a widespread mem of ‘privacy is dead’.
• Strangely enough, a lot of those spreading this meme have a strong commercial interest in your lack of privacy, in order to harvest your identity and resell it to advertisers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)#mediaviewer/File:Anonymous_at_Scientology_in_Los_Angeles.jpg
• The zeitgeist is very much concerned with surveillance and privacy. Many people and technologists are working to restore and enhance our online privacy.
“People with disabilitiesare the world's largest minority, an emerging market on par with the size of China!”
Source: Denis Boudreau
1 billionpeople
“There are 650m peopleclassified as hearing impairedin the world.
2%have treatment fortheir hearing loss.”
Source: heartoday.org
“Machine learning isthe most significant technology trend. Computers have to get smarter and anticipate.”
—Kevin TurnerMicrosoft COO
• When on a team retreat to process our research, we heard a ‘beep’ in the house. Then a short while later, another… and another.
• Where could it be from? We hunted and waited and hunted. Eventually we found it was a refridgerator door left very slightly ajar.
• This was an ‘aha!’ moment: the sensors were applying a new sense-making load onto us.
“Nearly all men can stand adversity,but if you want totest a man's character, give him power.”
—Abraham Lincoln
“Too many wrongly characterize the debate as ‘security versus privacy.’ The real choice isliberty versus control.”
— Bruce SchneierSecurity expert
• Companies harvest a crop that is our identity; the benefit to us is small in comparison.
• Voice exposes the disconnect between cost and benefit; the discomfort people have with voice recording is a wake-up call that we are giving too much away.
“Surveillance isn’t simplythe all-being all-looking eye. It’s a mechanism by which systems of powerassert their power.”
—danah boydScholar at Microsoft Research
• The very process of doing interviews using a hypervoice application alerted us to the problem.
• We would ask interviewees if we could record the call for note-taking purposes only.
• Our ‘contract’ with them was not, however, being recorded. And there was no enforcement mechanism.
• This was an asymmetrical relationship; we had their voice, they could not control it.
• As we move to more sophisticated processing of voice, the ‘refrigerator beep’ problem will just grow and grow.
• “Can we record your call, run it through my relational coach, transcribe it for our enterprise archive, store it in Iceland, use this data retention policy, test you for possible mental health issues…”
• This doesn’t scale as a user experience, or ethically.
“In this possibly terminal phaseof human existence,democracy and freedom aremore than just idealsto be valued – they may be essential to survival.”
—Noam Chomsky
"Manufacturing Consent"
“The single biggest problem in communication isthe illusionthat it has taken place.”
—George Bernard ShawPlaywright
• We are experiencing web serfdom. We are the tenant farmer on the Internet. Our identity is being tilled and sold for profit, without us reaping the benefits.
• We relinquish all rights when we are in a corporate context, and nearly all right just by using applications. It’s in or opt out.
• There is no ability to negotiates terms of use, manage the outcome, audit the process or hold parties accountable.
“Doubt and mistrustare the mere panic oftimid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer,and the large mind transcend.”
—Helen Keller
How do we
rebalance powerto get to “blissful productivity”
(sentient machinesworking for us)
and avoid the abyss(us working
for sentient machines)
?
• We must offload sense-making and decision-making to smart dynamic systems that act in our interest.
• How can this be done? We need to become aware of the framing of the issues that we are attracted to as technologists.
• The mainframe, minicomputer, PC and smartphone all follow a ‘yang’ paradigm.
• There is a closed and known universe with explicit rules that we ‘program’.
• The ‘command line’ is perhaps the most obvious exemplar of the masculine paradigm.
• The current ecology of data is living in an isolated biodome.
• Sensors puncture the biodome. Our view of ‘digital ecology’ needs to adjust accordingly.
• Self-augmentation is archetypally female: make-up, hairdos, ear piercings, neck adornments, carrying loads on heads with cloths, breast enhancement.
• Is there a fundamentally different paradigm approach? Is “artificial intelligence” even the right framing for the sensor world where we all have bodies?
• We are intolerant of machines joining us in conversation for a good reason.
• To get blissfully productive, we need to get superhuman.
• We need new savant qualities.
• The Guardian Avatar embodies this; a virtual ‘you’ that has the aspiration of accentuating the best of you and your life.
How does it work?
• Existing technologies– Personal data locker
– Federated ID
– Distributed identity & trust systems
– Distributed storage systems
– Biometrics
– Inference engines
– Privacy filters
– Assistants
– ASR
– Machine translation
– Sentiment analysis
• New & emerging technologies– VRM
– Gesture recognition
– Activity recognition
– Automatic content linking
– Homomorphic encryption
– Artificial sentience
– Inclusive & adaptive design
– Avatar animation
– Engagement analysis
– Voice reconstruction
Dynamic vs static identity
“We change every second that our heart beats.Our identity systems do not reflect this.”– E.K. Fitzsimmons
Why does it make sense?
• Computers are far better at completing tasks where the rules are explicit and the data set is extremely large.
• Logical systems are indefatigable and will perform explicit tasks more reliably.
Why should you care?
• It will protect our sanity, optimize our work flow to fit our mood, expand our time available for highly rewarding work and allow us to achieve blissful productivity.
Why is it important?
• It a moral imperative that we own our own identity.
–Self-soverignty should be an inalienable right.
• Governments have proven poor at protecting the privacy and managing identity.
“Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.”
— Kevin Kelly,Founder of Wired
www.hypervoice.org
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