In the 1890s, a German math teacher by the name of Wilhelm von Osten was convinced that his horse, named Hans, was capable of counting, addition, subtraction, square roots—in short, all manner of math problems. Von Osten would ask Hans a math question, and Hans would tap out the answer with one of his hooves. (Obviously, Hans was limited to positive integers.)
When Amazon’s Echo product line first appeared in 2014, its user interface was all about—nay, only about—voice commands to and responses from the device’s natural-language processing personality (known in Amazon’s parlance as an “intelligent personal assistant”) called Alexa.
Science fiction is littered with sentient, omnipresent computers that respond to voice commands. From the fatally flawed HAL 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey to the cool, confident Starship Enterprise computer to the snarky, easily distracted Heart of Gold computer in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, humans have imagined anthropomorphic computers that hear all, know all and control all.
