Artificial intelligence assistants are taking over

It was a weeknight, after dinner, and the baby was in bed. My wife and I were alone--we thought--discussing the sorts of things you might discuss with your spouse and no one else. I was midsentence when, without warning, another woman's voice piped in from the next room. "I HELD THE DOOR OPEN FOR A CLOWN THE OTHER DAY," the woman said in a loud, slow monotone. It took us a moment to realize that her voice was emanating from the black speaker on the kitchen table. We stared slack-jawed as she--it--continued: "I THOUGHT IT WAS A NICE JESTER." Was that," I said after a moment of stunned silence. Alexa, the voice assistant whose digital spirit animates the Amazon Echo, did not reply. She--it--responds only when called by name. Or so we had believed. We pieced together what must have transpired. Somehow, Alexa's speech recognition software had mistakenly picked the word Alexa out of something we said, then chosen a phrase like "tell me a joke" as its best approximation of whatever words ...