Dialogue with a Monologue: Voice Chips and the Products of Abstract Speech

This paper examines the use of integrated circuits that produce speech in consumer products, commonly called voice chips. The goal of this paper is to document what these products actually say and to try to understand what the voices of these products represent, specifically, what they say about techno-social relations. The paper describes how voice chip technology differs from other 'talking hardware' of the recording and communications industries, and places it in a unique social position. I then survey the voice chip patent literature and sample the products currently on the market. Finally, I investigate how the voices of these products can be interpreted as speech and interaction, drawing largely upon Suchman's examination of human-machine interaction. I conclude by using the chips’ voice to question their performance of abstract speech, if they demonstrate preprogrammable interaction, and therefore what we mean when we attribute speech as literal agency to technological products. Voice: a social technology Voice is the icon of person. It is the icon of the political agent. ‘To be given a voice’ is how we understand the fundamental unit of democracy, voting or being represented. It is the recognition of each person and also the device for interpolating a subject into society. In short it is the fundamental device of sociality. Used in contrast to techniques and technologies, the voice is a responsive and ephemeral device of sociality. The predetermined functions of products, manufacturing systems, word-processing software and other work-related technologies symbolize the stable, predictable and material aspects of society, while the voice is reserved as the device that is claimed to define human-ness, expressing emotion, negotiating, conversing, and ultimately, having agency. In fact, the preconditions for individuation and socialization rely if not directly on the voice, then at least symbolically. Individual agency and free will are both preempted by the voice and operationalized through the voice. All notions of the social are somehow tangled with the voice. Dialogue with a Monologue 2 Further, a voice is always understood from a social position. Thus, if talking is the act of sociality then the product must talk from its social position. Or conversely perhaps the product’s words are understood from its place in the social world . Giving a voice, gives a political presence -to be counted, understood, or at least listened to. Because voice is situated and local, voice chip products articulate the tension between the product as a mass market phenomena and its actual incarnation into an individual’s daily activity and meaning making.