Real Solutions for Everyday Anxiety & The Evolution of Talking Computers

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Today on Something You Should Know,

you won't believe all the incredible things your eyes can do.

Then, how to deal with anxiety, which has become a huge problem. Anxiety is increasing dramatically.
It went up 25% during the pandemic and then didn't come back down again, just kept growing. And half of young adults are suffering from crippling anxiety, and it just keeps going up.
Also, what many people still get wrong about washing their hands,

and the fascinating history and future of voice computing.

And is the voice of Alexa the voice of a real person?

So they did start out with someone who recorded basically lots of nonsense,

and then the algorithms join the individual pieces. It really is a kind of creative synthesis, if you like.
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Something you should know. Fascinating intel.
The world's top experts.

And practical advice you can use in your life.

Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

Do you have limbal rings in your eyes?

If you do, lucky you. and I'll tell you why.
Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers. Welcome to Something You Should Know, and we start today with your eyes.
Some fascinating things about your eyes. According to studies, limbal rings can make you appear more attractive.
The limbal ring is the dark round circle around your iris in your eye. Some people have them, some people don't.
And apparently, you're more likely to develop a crush on someone who shows prominent limbal rings. The eye muscle is the fastest reacting muscle in your entire body.
It contracts in less than 1 one-hundredth of a second. There are approximately 7 million cones and 130 million rods in your retina that respond to light, and they help you determine color and detail.
Around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, everybody had brown eyes. Then, the first blue-eyed baby was born, and now all blue-eyed people are related to that first baby and to each other.
Your eyes can see about 10 million different colors, but if you were part of the 1% of women with a rare genetic mutation, you'd be able to see 100 million colors. Both sides of both parents' families can all have brown eyes and still produce a blue-eyed baby.
And your eye color isn't set until you're about two years old. And that is something you should know.
Fear and anxiety. You often hear those two words mentioned together a lot.
Sometimes they're used interchangeably, but they are different. Well, fear is a good thing in that it helps keep us safe, where anxiety is not as useful.
Yet a lot of people spend a lot of time in an anxious state, worrying. And what's wrong with that? Well, listen to my guest, Martha Beck.
She's a Harvard-trained sociologist and speaker who is the author of a book called Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose. Hi, Martha.
Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike.
It's an honor to be here. So first, explain a little better and a little deeper the difference between fear and anxiety.
Fear is a highly energized response to a clear and present physical danger. All animals feel fear, and it's necessary for our survival.
We would walk right into traffic if we didn't have it. And it gives us a bolt of adrenaline.
And then if we get away from the danger, it subsides. That's the way it happens in all animals except humans.
But humans have the ability to take that initial fear, even if there wasn't a scary situation, we can imagine one. And that creates a kind of ghost in our minds.
We keep telling stories to ourselves about the reasons we should be afraid and we should be cautious. And that feeds into the primitive parts of the brain as an actual physical danger.
So for us, the fear response never subsides. It goes on and on and on, even when we're perfectly safe.
Well, I've never really thought of it that way. But when I think of an animal, like a dog, say, and you see a dog become afraid, become fearful, but when the danger leaves, you don't see the dog sitting around pondering, you know, when's it going to happen again and what else could go wrong? You know, it deals with the fear and moves on.
No, I have watched in Africa, I've watched an antelope be chased by a lion and the lion gives up. And then the antelope notices that the lion gave up and goes immediately back into a state of calm and just starts eating with the lion still pretty nearby.

So, yeah, our systems are meant to heal and relax when we're not in danger.

So that when danger comes, we'll have the capacity and the stored up energy to respond.

Anxiety bleeds that out of us.

So it makes us afraid all the time and takes away the only beneficial use of fear.

Well, that's really stupid.

No kidding.

That's really stupid. Where is anxiety's place in the world? Is anxiety becoming a bigger problem? Has it always been a problem? Where are we with it? It's getting much, much worse.
so 300 years ago we would have woken to hear water running, wind in trees, birdsong. There's a study I just read that shows that birdsong is incredibly helpful to us.
We would have lived among trees and plants, and the pheromones from those trees and plants actually affect our health. So if you go into a forest, within a few hours, your cancer killing cells triple.
There are all these ways we evolved to be in a certain state of being and humans lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. Now we wake up and we hear bad news.
We see it on our phones. Then we get up and we rush to places where we're trying to work competitively with a group of strangers instead of being at home among our loved ones.
There are all these social conditions that really feed anxiety. And as technology keeps developing, the stories are spinning faster, and they're coming in harder, and they're more outrageous, and people are yelling at each other online and then in the real world.
And because of that, anxiety is increasing dramatically. It went up 25% during the pandemic, 25%.
And then didn't come back down again, just kept growing. It only goes one way when you're spinning stories the way our culture does.
So it's now the leading mental health disease or condition in the world. And half of young adults are suffering from crippling anxiety, and it just keeps going up.
I know people who seem anxious a lot of the time, and I know people who are very go with the flow. So what is that spectrum and who's on it where? I think it has to do with how much, well, it has several contributory forces.
Like there's the amount of trauma you've experienced in your life. People who've experienced trauma are more edgy and anxious all the time.
People with really high verbal skills tend to be more anxious because they're using

the part of the brain, the left hemisphere, both for language and for fear, because the storytelling capacity of that part of the brain is what allows us to be afraid when nothing dangerous is present, imagination. On the spectrum of things, it's interesting you should use that phrase.
I have a son with Down syndrome who is the light of my life. And he has been my teacher in how to not be anxious.
He just had surgery to have a pacemaker inserted. And I said, are you in pain? Afterward, I'd say, are you in pain? Are you worried? And he'd say, why would I be? No, it's fine.

And I would just, I'm amazed by his capacity to simply be with what is. And it has very much to

do with the fact that he's not particularly verbal. So I see the very conditions that breed anxiety

being encouraged and in fact, pushed really hard by social forces in our particular culture. And without that, I think people are much more willing to relax into that nonverbal space and be present in nature, which is the optimal scenario for freeing yourself from anxiety.
Well, it seems that the way we typically handle anxiety is to basically try to squash it, you know, calm down, relax, you'll be fine. Stop being so anxious, which, you know, when you think about it, that doesn't work.
It really doesn't. So if you were to find the wet, shaky, timid little puppy on your doorstep, a newborn puppy, and you decided you were going to try to help it, what would you do? I'm asking this in real time.
What would you, Mike, do if you found a puppy like this? Well, of course, you would comfort it. You would pet it.
You would talk softly to it. You would do just as I would do like when my dog, when lightning and thunder is outside and the dog is going nuts because he gets so anxious from that, you don't yell at it.
You don't tell it to calm down. You comfort it.
Exactly. And if I told you, if you were in the middle of a panicky situation, calm down, you couldn't.
but if I said to you even if you were in a really strong frightening environment

something if you were in the middle of a panicky situation, calm down, you couldn't. But if I said to you, even if you were in a really strong, frightening environment, something that was really making you anxious or even fearful, and you were trying to protect that animal, I could say, be kind.
And even if you were still scared, you could operationalize that. You know how to be kind to an animal.
And as I've worked with people, I've realized that the step between anxiety and creativity is actually the absolutely most important. And it's also the step people don't think is that it sort of blends into the background.
People are all excited about creativity. But to get to creativity, what you need is kindness.
You need kindness to the part of yourself that is anxious. So give me an example of how to do that.
Okay, so anytime you're feeling something, you know, you can't sleep or you're being audited or you're worried about your relationship or whatever it is, treat it,

treat that part of yourself, the part that is frightened, exactly as you would treat a small frightened animal. So sometimes I actually have people put a hand on their own chest and just press gently.
That really triggers a sense of comfort in the brain. And then do what you just described doing for a little frightened animal.
Lower the tone, the volume and the pitch of your voice. Say comforting things, not because this part of your brain understands them, it doesn't, but because the sound itself and the intention is clear.
So say to yourself simple things like, it's okay. I've got you.
Don't worry. Tell me everything.
You get to feel exactly the way you're feeling right now. I'm just here with you.
You got this. And I also ask people to use this phrasing from Tibetan meditation.
It's called loving kindness meditation. And it starts with may you.
May you be well. May you be happy.
May you be free and protected. May you have ease in your life.
May you feel loved. May you feel known.
May you feel held. May you feel, and you just keep offering and offering and offering these kind wishes.
And what that's doing neurologically is moving you out of the place of anxiety and into the place of compassion. That's what shifts the balance between anxiety and creativity.
If kindness persists, the anxiety relaxes. And in the space where it used to be, creativity arises in ways that will blow your mind.
And life becomes a joyride. Well, I have to know how to do that because who wouldn't want their life to be a joyride? I'm speaking with Martha Beck.
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So explain how my life can become a joyride.

I was studying this during the pandemic, during the lockdown.

And I thought this is a great chance to run an experiment on myself.

Every day I'm going to get up and perform tasks of some kind that require me to use the right side of my brain, the creative side of my brain. And this is not just creativity as in the arts.
You're being creative when you make a sandwich or put together an outfit for the day or, you know, go a new way to work or something. We're always creating, creating, creating.
So I decided I knew because I used to be a teaching fellow in the art department at Harvard. I knew we had used a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
And we really, really focused on helping students activate their right hemispheres. So I started doing that.
I'd get up every day and start drawing. And I thought, I'll just see what happens.
I'm going to do this for a month.

I'll see where I go from here.

Well, I didn't go anywhere from there.

I just started drawing 20 hours a day.

And it was like this childlike part of myself had been kept in a cage.

And the joy and the absolute thrill I was getting, I didn't keep any of this art.

I mean, it wasn't great art. It was the doing of it and the freedom to just be creative.
Wow. But the effect of anxiety is to block part of the brain, while the effect of creativity is to include the whole brain.
And I started to feel as if I were fully alive for the first time since childhood. And that has sustained.
So put that in a real life example. So you're feeling anxious, go make a sandwich.
I mean, that's not that. I bet a lot of people do that.
So the first thing is remember, I use the acronym CAT, K-A-T, not C-A-T. CAT stands for kindness, art, activity, and then transcendence.
The first part, the K is kindness, just as I've described it in the last few minutes. Put your hand on your chest, give yourself room to breathe, take deep breaths in and out, relax your mind as much as you can, and offer yourself kind wishes until the anxiety starts to abate.
If you do that, and sometimes you'll, I would, if I were working with a client, that might be their only assignment every day for a month or two months. It is so crucial to learn to be kind to ourselves.
And culturally, we are not taught or encouraged to to be kind to ourselves. So focus on that first.
If you start to feel the effects of kindness, you will begin to think about things you could change or make. So when people are in a tough situation, I ask them to shift from asking, what can I do? What should I do? What will I do? To what can I make, what should I make, what will I make? And you start thinking about ways you could rearrange the world.
It often starts when I'm working with clients with them rearranging their furniture or getting their hair cut differently or something like that. These are acts of creativity.
And then if they continue to be kind to themselves, they end up creating amazing things.

Whatever your deepest passions are, if you're kind enough to yourself, they will start to arise and make stuff. And the T in KAT stands for transcendence.
And that you don't have to do. if you can be kind consistently

and you allow whatever impulses come up

to be enacted, and you actually go and do things that you want to, I call this making a sanity quilt out of your life. It's not a crazy quilt, which means lots of weird pieces sewn together.
It's you taking the things you love most, and putting them together as the center of your attention. Maybe not your time, but your attention goes to things you love.
And then eventually, and it doesn't even take very long, you reach a point where you find your purpose. Frederick Boikner, the theologian, said, Your mission in life is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
And that's what happens. I've worked with thousands of clients.
And when they do get calm in those calm and creative moments, they always end up finding a place where their deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. But as long as we're anxious, we can't know our deep gladness.
Is this mostly, you know, like a first aid approach, like when you're anxious, or is there some sort of long-term effect? Or can you do this, can you practice this in non-anxious moments, and it offers help when you are anxious? Both, actually. You can get a little emergency kit, your little emergency kit for when you're anxious.
And it can use the little exercises I've been talking about here. Turns out if you write about your anxiety, it really helps it abate.
People who've been through a trauma and draw for a few minutes about the trauma, they just draw something, they don't have to be artistic, but they have a much lower incidence of PTSD, 80% less PTSD. So it's very much a first aid kit.
And once the calm starts to settle, and it will, in the kindness, you will go back to your relaxed state the way an animal's system goes back. We re-regulate the nervous system so it's in a place of continuous rest, which is very generative.
Our brains are always making something. Mostly we're trained to make scary stories and then obey them.
But when we don't make scary stories, when we're actually looking at the things that make us feel curious and interested and excited, it becomes a way of life. You know, in the 60s, NASA commissioned a study to detect creative geniuses so it could hire them.
And they gave this test to a bunch of highly educated adults, and 2% of them scored like creative geniuses. So this went on for a while.
And then someone thought to give the same test to four and five-year-olds. 98% of them scored as creative geniuses.
And the researchers blamed socialization. We get socialized out of our creative genius.
But that can be reversed. And the thing is, it's not becoming creative.
It's returning to the creative genius state that was born into us. And I believe we all have it.
What do you mean? Explain what you mean by we're mostly trained to make scary stories and obey them. Okay.
So look at the news, scroll through your phone, talk to people. Let's take the algorithms online.
Whatever gets the most attention gets repeated. So if the algorithm sees that you are looking at a certain subject for a longer period of time, it will give you more stories like that.
The brain has something called a negativity bias. I call it the 15 puppies and a cobra syndrome.
If you went into a room that contained 15 golden retriever puppies and one cobra, you would be focused on the cobra. And because of this, this helps keep us alive, obviously, but humans get stuck in the negativity bias.
And that means we're sort of spinning around and then we pay really close attention to things that scare us. So that's why they say in journalism, if it bleeds, it leads.
It's why we slow down to gawk at accidents because the brain is equipped to be fascinated by dangerous things to learn from them how to survive. So what's meant to be a momentary alarm followed by peace becomes a momentary alarm followed by 19 different news stories about disaster, which causes the algorithms around us to bring in more stories that scare us because that's what we're spending the most attention on.
And these are not happening to us. This can all happen while you're sitting in a chair.
How do other people mitigate my anxiety? In other words, it seems like one of anxiety's best friends is solitude because then you convince yourself of anything, because no one's telling you you're wrong.

That's right.

So how does having people around you help mitigate these negative things? If the most horrifying thing to me about our present situation historically is that there are sad, disaffected people who can sit alone in their rooms and get into conversations with other people who are alone and anxious, and they start to feed each other's anxiety and create these little silos of anxiety, which have been shown, by the way, to cause more loneliness in the long run. But if you take a person who's very anxious and you take them into, let's say you take them, you go to a play on Broadway or something, and there's an astonishing display of human creativity, music, beautiful people, beautiful lights, beautiful everything, it can simply stop anxiety in its tracks.
And the feeling of anxiety being stopped in its tracks is awe. I just mentioned my son and when he had his pacemaker put in, he had, there was a moment when his, he flatlined, his heart went to zero beats per minute.
And of course, I was going to be very anxious, but I didn't have time. I called for a doctor, but before I even finished, all these nurses and doctors burst into the room and they started, they had the paddles and they had all the things.
And I stood in the hallway watching them through an open door, just sobbing. And somebody came up and said, this is so traumatic for you.
And I said, no, I'm in awe of the love that these people have for a complete stranger with Down syndrome. I am in awe of the human capacity for invention, for technology, and most of all, for love.
That just stops you when you see it. And you realize that being anxious is to throw away your life.

It's much more important to stay with what brings all.

Great. Well, this is a wonderful conversation, Martha, and I feel less anxious for having it.

I've been speaking with Martha Beck. She is a Harvard-trained sociologist and speaker

and author of the book, Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose. And there's a link to her book in the show notes.
Great job, Martha. Thank you.
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You type what you want to say. Now, if you've ever watched the original Star Trek TV series where Captain Kirk or Scotty would, they would just talk to their computers.
They would stand in a room and say, computer, set the course for wherever the destination was. And that idea of just talking to a computer seemed pretty far-fetched.
Today, while we still type a lot to communicate with computers, we do have things like Alexa and Siri, and there continues to be a push for computers and devices that we simply talk to rather than type to. So where did the idea of talking to machines start? Are we all going to just talk to computers in the future, and they're just going to talk back to us? Could this replace some human conversations? And what are the implications of that? Because when you talk to Alexa or Siri, it sort of feels like you're talking to a person.
Here to discuss this is Sarah Bell. She is a writer and professor who studies the impacts of information technologies on society.
And she's author of a book called Vox Ex Machina, A Cultural History of Talking Machines. Hi Sarah, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Hi Mike, thanks for having me. So the idea of talking to a computer and it talking back shows up in movies and TV shows and probably in books and things.
So the idea has been something people have thought about for a long time. Yeah, it's really interesting.
I mean, I feel like that idea, that kind of dream of having a machine you can communicate with even goes back before we had computers. Even in the sort of age of enlightenment, when the scientific revolution started up in the 18th century, there were ideas about making machinery mimic human beings.
And that was basically everything a human being could do, including talking. Of course, it didn't work very well, and the machines couldn't interpret speech.
So there was no hearing in that situation. But people carried that through.
And really, you know, the beginning of the telegraph, and then the telephone, even before, is all about this sort of dream of being able to interact with machines that are as much like us as we can kind of make them. So the first what you would consider talking machine thing in the modern era was what? So I start with machine in the 1930s called the Voter, which stood for voice demonstrator.
And I start with that machine because it is electromechanic, because as soon as you kind of add electricity to machinery, then things really take off. And that's when we start getting, you know, in just a few years after that during World War II, electric computers and so forth.
So, I start with that machine, which was just a demonstrator, like it was called. It was created by AT&T, the phone company, their Bell Labs research arm.
And it was on display at the 1939 World's Fair., millions of people saw it or heard it. It was also on the radio.
It was promoted in magazines. It was actually quite famous for a short period of time.
And so, lots of people knew about it. But it is kind of the beginning, even pre-computer at that point of electronic speech synthesis.
What was it demonstrating? It was demonstrating speech. So interestingly, like AT&T had lots of exhibits at this, at their pavilion at this world's fair.
One of the most, I think, well attended and exciting for many people was AT&T was actually giving away long distance phone calls every day and then the audience could listen in to people actually making long distance phone calls. And I only bring that up because that kind of tells you how new this idea of speaking to anyone through a wire was.
I mean, 1930s and we've still, you know, people have never heard a long distance telephone call. It's too new and it's too expensive, really, for them.
And so this was really supposed to be a demonstration of just how scientific AT&T was and how cutting edge they were. And they were doing all these things and they could even make a machine talk, which made all the headlines at the time in the newspapers and so

forth. And the voice of the machine was what? Well, it was described as having an electronic accent, but it was created out of basically the kind of hiss of electricity running through some filters and so forth.
And it was manipulated by a woman. They were all women sitting at something that looked kind of like a little organ, a little playable organ with about a couple dozen keys.
And so she manipulated that electronic hiss through those filters to create the different sounds of speech. Each of these women, they had to practice for almost a year, actually, to get the machine to actually elicit recognizable speech.
So today we have things like Siri and Alexa, and those are seemingly very sophisticated in the sense that you can just talk and get a response. And what is that technology? So that is a combination of speech synthesis, which is taking, at this stage, it's actually taking little teeny tiny bits of cut up speech and using some computer algorithms to join them together.
And that's called concatenative synthesis, fancy word that just means they've been kind of glued together. And that's one side of it.
But the other side is speech recognition. And that actually took a lot longer to create.
And that is a statistical process where kind of in reverse, the machine looks at the speech pattern and figures out statistically what the sound is most likely to be. But the thing that made speech synthesis the interface that we know it today, in other words, Siri and Alexa, those things that we can talk to is the combination of not just the synthesis or what the Alexa voice sounds like, but also our ability, as you say, to speak and be understood by that technology, that piece of software.
Is the voice of Alexa and Siri, are those real people or is that all created in a computer somewhere? It's actually a combination. So I would say that some of the sounds are probably very unique to the system itself.
In other words, so they did start out with someone who recorded basically lots of nonsense. And then the software actually cuts that all up into little pieces.
And like I said, those algorithms join the individual pieces. So, it starts out as a person, but probably if you heard the voice of Siri speak, you may or may not actually recognize the human person as the voice of Siri, because it really is a kind of creative synthesis, if you like.
And so when I ask a question of Alexa or Siri, I speak my question and I get an answer back. What happened in the middle? I get that I spoke into the machine, the machine spoke back to but what happened in the middle to make all that happen?

That's a good question. Lots of computer processing, because not only did the program need to recognize the, it's basically a speech to text kind of pattern.
So it recognizes the words that you used, it puts them in a text stream that the computer can understand. And then it looks for those text patterns in its databases, which is one of the reasons that I don't know how much you interact with Alexa, but with the Alexa that we have in our house, one of the main, what we call a fallback that we get from Alexa is, hmm, I'm not sure about that.
Because if it doesn't, if it's not able to quickly put that through a text database and find some kind of answer, then it's going to default to the phrase like that where it tells you that it doesn't understand. The other thing that it often does is say, I found something on the web.
So that's kind of the other default database where it will actually take the first web result and kind of read it to you as a text to speech. So speech to text and then text to speech, it kind of goes in both directions in that interaction.
Is any of the technology that this speech synthesis stuff is today, like Alexa and Siri and... Well, what else is there besides Alexa and Siri? I mean, is speech very much a consumer thing because people are lazy and they just want to ask for Alexa to tell them the time rather than go find a clock? I mean, is that what it's for? Or is mastering this speech stuff really going to propel us into the future? I mean, that's an excellent question.
I've never, you know, I do history. I've never considered myself much of a futurist, but history can tell us something about the patterns that we can expect to see.
If we look back at the history of both speech synthesis and speech recognition, One of the threads of research happened to be for the purpose of creating a text-to-speech machine for folks who were blind or maybe had disabilities of their speech organs or something like that. And so there certainly are incredible uses for folks who need to interact with computers in certain ways.
And of course, most of us need to interact with computers in this day and age. But as many things go, the thrust of development is always towards things that you can make money off of.
And so a lot of those applications, of course, are our consumer applications like Alexa. Interestingly, I don't know if people can even remember back this far, but right before ChatGPT went public at the end of what was that, 2022, Amazon had largely cut their Alexa team.
And part of that was because I think, and this is just, I don't know, there's a little bit of research about this, but we know that people were mostly using it, like you said, to ask for the time, to have it play music, to ask it what the weather was, maybe to ask about its stock quotes, but not anything that was really valuable to Amazon.

But then we got large language models in the public. And so in the last two years, there's been a push again to make speech the interface of our interactions with those large language models.
And I don't know where that will take us, to be honest, but we see kind of the same things recur that have recurred for the last 60, 70 years, and that we've been told they are the answer to things like a lot of our health-related issues, so promoting elder care and that kind of thing, or our educational issues, so to make education more interactive with children using these kinds of programs. And this is supposed to offload labor from people like teachers and nurses and so on

and so forth. I'm a little skeptical.
You might hear that in my voice. I'm a little skeptical

about some of those applications. But I will say that with computing, with eras of computing,

we've actually seen those promises over and over again since the 1950s. Well, as you say, if you can't make money on it, there's not much point in developing it.
But because it's a voice, it synthesizes the human voice, there does seem to be some potential there, right? Therapy, for example, through chatbots. That's also something that's gone way back to the 60s that has caused a lot of controversy, right? About having your therapist not, you know, be a computer program, basically, rather than a person.
But I think they'll probably keep working on it. We see a lot of hype about people having relationships with these chat

bots. I still, when I play with them, I find them to be a little too brittle for that.
I feel like I can still tell very, very quickly that it's not a thing that I can really engage in any kind of creative conversation. So time will tell about some of that.

I think hopefully as the public,

we're looking at some of these technologies

with a highly critical eye and thinking,

what are the pro-social applications

and what are those applications

that maybe we kind of want to stay away from

that would turn out to have some unintended consequences that we might not like very much. So you mentioned that the original Siri and maybe Alexa were actual real people talking nonsense.
But today, I mean, when I watch these videos where people don't want to use their own voice, so they have their voice, a voice, basically read it for them. I have this suspicion that these are not real people voices doing what you had described earlier of taking little bits and pieces, that these are totally created voices.
Am I right? I think for the most part, yeah, we're getting to the stage where, so there have been iterations of speech synthesis, of course, through this, you know, 100, basically 100 years of history. And people have tried different ways to create the speech.
And it's always been dependent on how much computing power really was available to people in a cost effective way. And I think we've gotten to a point, just like the large language models, where there's so much data stored, that instead of having that voice bank of individual recordings that I spoke about earlier, like you were saying, the human who recorded all of the nonsense for Siri, that those little pieces are kind of being identified statistically and picked out of that giant database of speech that exists.
And one thing that we know about Alexa, if you use any of the Echo devices, we were told at the end of March by the company, of course, that they would be recording everything at that time. And so, they are expanding the database of speech that they have to pull from and then create synthetically and statistically.
I keep using that word, but that's because I think a lot of people don't think very much about what's behind these processes. And it's not a person, right? It's not a, in my view, it's not anything sentient or cognizant.
It is a mathematical process where there's very large, very fast computing power that can go through all of this data and pull out what it needs and put it together very rapidly. But it's still a computational process and not, you know, not a person or a wizard behind the curtain, so to speak.
Do we know, and I don't know if this is something that you've looked into, but when you're using voice technology, when you're interacting with something that's talking back to you, does the voice matter? In other words, on Google Maps, you can have the lady with the British accent, or you can have the guy, or you can have a man with an American accent. Does that matter, or it's just a preference? That is an excellent question.
I would argue that it probably does matter. It starts out as a preference and depending on how much we interact with these products.
One time I mentioned this in the book, this is in the Guinness World of Records, before Google Maps was our default geographic information system, The most popular, most downloaded sat-nav voice was Dan Castellaneta's Homer Simpson character. People wanted Homer Simpson as their sat-nav voice.
That's kind of interesting. But in some ways, these products definitely fulfill or establish some of the stereotypes that we already have about voices.
I was just reading a paper, for example, about a team that's trying to make a cute anime voice even cuter. That was the word they were using because the people, quite frankly, it's largely young men, right, who use this voice, as you say, like they

choose it for their programs and so forth. They want it to sound a certain way.
But what does that

mean for their interactions with other people who don't have that kind of cute voice, right?

The voice of Alexa, for example, it's a very soothing, pleasant voice that someone decided

this is the voice of Alexa because it's soothing and pleasant. But if she was like a real jerk, you know, if she, what do you, oh, you again? What do you want now? You know, the interactions would be very different because she was being jerky.
There is something to the subjectiveness of the voice itself that either makes the interaction pleasant and then likely to encourage more or not. And I wonder, like, how much of the equation is that? Like, let's get a voice that does this.
Yeah, very much. There's a lot of, at least starting with the, like, in the 80s and 90s, there was quite a bit of communication and psychological research

done, especially out of the speech lab, the communication lab at Stanford University. In the 80s and 90s, they were really doing a lot of research.
And a lot of that research was exactly what you're talking about. What kind of voice appeals to what kind of people.
And so the reason that we have something like Alexa, as you say, is a kind of soothing female voice, non-threatening, is for whatever reason, and some people argue that it's actually something that we get from just having a mother, or some people will say it's kind of inborn, and other people will say that it's enculturated.ated and either way, it's very true that for certain applications, people definitely showed a preference for that kind of female voice in certain applications. And then there were other applications like back in the 80s and the day of the talking car, there were several automakers who tried to add speech to cars and people didn't like a woman's voice telling them that their oil needed changed, for example.

And so what are we supposed to take from all of this? What's your big so what here? To remember and to recognize that they are the products of corporations, to remember that for everything that they make easier for us, they are also probably making something a little bit more difficult. So for example, I think one of the reasons a lot of people just ask Alexa for the time and to be the DJ and for the weather is because when you ask Alexa something else, you don't get all of the choices that you might get by asking an informational question, even on the internet, right, where you would get lots of web search answers.
And so it also sort of reduces some of our experience. And I would just like people to think about both of those, both the opportunities and also the way it kind of reduces our experience with other people.
Well, what you just said, you know, I hadn't really thought about much before, but when you talk to Alexa and ask for information, you pretty much get one thing. Whereas if you do it on a computer, you'll get, if you search Google, you'll get a whole list of possible things to look at.
And just the fact that it's one thing versus a multitude of things holds that technology back a bit. I've been speaking with Sarah Bell.
She is author of the book Vox Ex Machina, A Cultural History of Talking Machines. And there is a link to that book in the show notes.
Sarah, thanks for being here. I think we've all had it drilled into us, how important it is to wash your hands, how it helps keep you from getting sick, and how it prevents spreading illness to others.
But there's some interesting research that points out a lot of us still aren't getting it right. For example, you shouldn't really rely on a hand sanitizer as a substitute for washing your hands.
Hand sanitizer doesn't kill everything. For example, norovirus.
It's a highly contagious stomach virus that's very common on cruise ships and also spreads seasonally. The virus cannot be killed with hand sanitizer, but it is easily destroyed with soap and water.
Not washing hands at critical times. Most of us do wash our hands after using the bathroom or before we handle food, but a lot of people forget to wash their hands after going to the grocery store or a restaurant or the doctor's office or a pharmacy or a hospital.
Also, a lot of us report that we do wash our hands more during the fall and winter and less so in the spring and summer. But we shouldn't let up.
Disease can be spread all year round. So wash your hands often and wash your hands for at least 20 seconds every time.
That's the expert advice, and that is something you should know. If you found this episode of Something You Should Know interesting, entertaining, informative, you could share your thoughts by writing a review and giving us a rating on whatever platform you're listening on.
I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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