The Amazon Alexa personal assistant is doing well in terms of sales – and with its customers, as NewScientist (17 December 2016, paywall) reports, in a way that was unanticipated:
Daren Gill, director of product management for the Alexa personal assistant used by Amazon’s Echo, says he has been surprised by how often people try to engage the assistant in purely social interaction. “Every day, hundreds of thousands of people say ‘good morning’ to Alexa,” he says. Half a million people have professed their love. More than 250,000 have proposed. You could write these off as jokes, but one of the most popular interactions is “thank you” – which means people are bothering to be polite to a piece of technology.
It’d be fascinating to see an analysis broken down by the vocations/careers of the customers, particularly for those whose marriage propositions were serious. Does that consist mostly of non-engineers, who, not knowing the internals of software, are more accepting of other entities as possible spouses? Or are we seeing software engineers who are building their own spouses?
Or does this have something to do with autistic individuals and how the reactions of Alexa are far more acceptable than a neurotypical human?
