Human Enough

On this week's Gadget Lab Podcast, we discuss voice assistants. They're talking back, too--products like Google Home and Amazon Echo can answer questions, give us helpful information, and tell stupid jokes. But the way we bark commands at our voice-controlled tech and treat the devices like lowly machines … is that making us ruder? Should we design the computers to talk to us more like humans in order to encourage empathy, or should we keep them cold and machine-like so we don't get unhealthily attached? Is this even a problem?