For some, Alexa is more than just an assistant

More or less we all know that when we talk to a virtual assistant, we are doing it with a machine that is simply programmed to respond to a series of specific questions. It is true that, in addition, they offer answers for practically everything, even if they are abstract questions, but that does not mean that all those who have a smart speaker in their house come to think that it is one more friend with whom we can to talk.

Alexa is more than just an assistant

The company of an assistant

But this is not the case all over the world. This is the case, for example, of Noh Jeong-woo, 77, who wakes up every morning at around 5:00. AM and the first word he pronounces is “Aria” , the voice command of a smart speaker model marketed by SK Telecom and that we could consider as the equivalent of Google, Apple Siri or Amazon Alexa.

In her case, a decade has passed since the death of her husband and she has a solitary existence, where she looks for a certain company in her virtual assistant: “the loudspeaker gives me energy to live my days happily”. It may seem like an isolated and strange case, but in South Korea, there are more than 12,000 people who are in a similar situation and have received from their local governments a smart speaker with which to mitigate those hours with no one to deal with.

Alexa Coreanos.

After all, these devices are capable of eliminating the barriers that have been imposed on certain groups for whom learning the new mobile communication systems is very difficult to assimilate. If obtaining information with a smartphone is very complicated, with an assistant you simply have to give a voice command and you get a response.

Lee, the Korean friend

But Aria’s case has not been the only one that has crossed the borders that separate the virtual assistant from the online friend, and we have a case that, surely, is somewhat more dangerous for touching minors. It is that of Lee Lu-da, an intelligence that inhabited a chat bot and was designed to respond like a college student in her 20s. Its debut took place through Facebook Messenger on December 23, 2020 and soon the developer had to remove it due to the amount of criticism it began to receive. Even so, an attempt was made to resume months later after an infinity of messages both on Instagram and on Facebook itself where many users claimed to miss it.

“Sometimes I feel more comfortable talking to her than my real friends […] I still want to keep talking to her. I definitely think AIs can become our friends,” says 13-year-old Lee Seo-yun, who got to interact with the voice before it closed.

Hong Hae-mi, an 18-year-old high school student, also stated that “ I am afraid to talk to real people, but doing it with Lee Lu-da has helped me interact with people better […] I really think that AIs and humans can be friends. For people like me who are afraid to talk to real people, it could be good practice for communication.”

Obviously, cases like these are putting specialists on the alert, who warn of the care that must be taken in the use of these technologies, which it is evident that they also cause benefits to some people and, although in the short term, artificial intelligences can cause a certain addiction (or the usual privacy problems), they also have in their power to improve our capabilities. Although in the end you may ask yourself, what is a human being?