Wake Words
- Type: Digital Art
- Medium: Screenshots
- Date: 2020
- Artist: Gunther Cox
Description:
In software engineering “wake words” refer to spoken words or phrases that result in an automated processes being carried our when they are detected. Some commonly recognized ones include “Hey Siri”, “Hey Alexa”, or “Hey Google”. Wake words are typically detected subsequent to, or as a part of a process called voice activity detection (VAD). VAD algorithms often employ probabilistic classification to attempt to determine if audio signals resemble human speech. False positives are not uncommon, and many sounds including animal calls and traffic noise can trigger both VAD and wake word detection. In the case of many modern mobile devices, the wake word detections activates more computationally expensive speech recognition and digital assistants running on these devices.
This exhibit highlights a collection of screenshots from cases where the Google assistant was accidentally activated, and the combination of background noise produced results that were somewhat poetic.
Screenshot 1: A very gentle soul #
In this first screenshot, the text reads: “it’s very gentle soul most like a.m”, to which the virtual assistant issues the response “I don’t understand”.
Perhaps we may puzzle here, as to why the nature of the soul is like the morning (A.M). One answer might be that just as the sun rises and sets, so does the course of our life. Yet the essence of machines rests less concerned with mortality than that of man. Perhaps then, the response of not-understanding would represent a disconnection of experience, rather than the more literal interpretation of this simply being a mechanical failure - a failure to generate a response to an incoherent sound.
Screenshot 2: I was dreaming, or is this real #
This next screenshot seems to depict some question about whether the current moment is real or a dream. Repeated words add the eyre sense of an echo, perhaps not too dissimilar to the verse in Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Dream Within a Dream” which states that “All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.”.
