Synthetic voice technologies are increasingly passing as human. But today’s voice assistants are still a far cry from the hyper-intelligent thinking machines we’ve been musing about for decades. In this episode, we explore how machines learn to communicate—and what it means for the humans on the other end of the conversation.

In this encore edition we revisit an episode from last year.

Links to our reporting:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/18/1061320/digital-clones-of-dead-people/

https://www.technologyreview.com/topic/artificial-intelligence/voice-assistants/

We meet:

Susan C. Bennett, voice of Siri

Cade Metz, The New York Times

Charlotte Jee, MIT Technology Review

Credits:

This episode was produced by Jennifer Strong, Emma Cillekens, Anthony Green, Karen Hao and Charlotte Jee. This episode was edited by Michael Reilly and Niall Firth.