@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ title: "Choose Your Own Smart Wife"
The aim here is for participants to interrogate the stereotypical gendered ideology that underpins emerging home technologies that we might otherwise call advanced.
[Excerpt from The Smart Wife: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/smart-wife]
Excerpt from [The Smart Wife[(https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/smart-wife)
“There are a range of artificial wife- inspired creations moving into our homes. These include robovacs, smart fridges and laundry- folding machines, digital home voice assistants, social robots, sexbots, and other feminized (and even supposedly gender- neutral) AI devices intended to help around the home. Many of these technologies resemble an idealized 1950s’ housewife, subservient to the needs of her family. These smart wives are already performing a range of wifework, including housekeeping, homemaking, caring, and sex.
@@ -27,8 +27,7 @@ And so we find ourselves at a crossroads, where we consider two familiar marital
Imagine you are a voice-activated smart home-operating system. Write your introduction script. How would you introduce yourself and explain your purpose to your new user(s)? What is your name? Or, do you have a name? Would you describe your personality? Do you have any other defining features? Do you want to explain how you are operated? What can you do? What won't you do? How do you interact with other devices, or others in the home? What do you listen and respond to? What do people need to do to get started interacting with you?
Choose a voice for your voice assistant. Insert your introduction script into a text-to-speech tool. You can use Google's text-to-speech tool to create a voice for your assistant (or another text-to speech tool if you prefer) [https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech]
Vary the accent, vocal tone, pitch and speed of your assistant's voice until you are happy with it. (If using Google’s text-to-speech tool you can do this by heading down to the subheading “Put Text-to-Speech into action”.)
Choose a voice for your voice assistant. Insert your introduction script into a text-to-speech tool. You can use Google's [text-to-speech tool](https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech) to create a voice for your assistant (or another text-to speech tool if you prefer) Vary the accent, vocal tone, pitch and speed of your assistant's voice until you are happy with it. (If using Google’s text-to-speech tool you can do this by heading down to the subheading “Put Text-to-Speech into action”.)
Small groups
- Listen to one another’s voice assistant scripts. What do they have in common? How are they different? Discuss your decision-making process when writing your script and choosing a voice for your assistant. Did you decide that your voice assistant has a gender? How is this inscribed on the voice you chose? Is race inscribed on the voice you chose?
