The Surprising Repercussions of Making AI Assistants Sound Human

Ask Alexa about the weather, and it'll tell you it's sunny and 75 in a pleasant monotone. Prompt it to tell you a joke, and it'll offer a pun in its signature staccato. Suggest that it sing a song, and it'll belt out an auto-tuned country ballad. Amazon's virtual assistant boasts a number of clever, humanlike abilities--but, as its voice betrays, Alexa is still just a robot. To help rid Alexa of its cyborgian lilt, Amazon recently upgraded its speech synthesis markup language tags, which developers use to code more natural verbal patterns into Alexa's skills, or apps.