The Uncanny Valley

I've had a tough time. A tooth abscess laid me low. One evening, after days of intense pain that constant doses of Tylenol and Advil barely touched, and the night before the root canal was finally scheduled, I decided to draw a bath.

I don't take baths here, since water conservation is always top of mind. I've measured it and the tub takes 30 gallons. That's a lot. But I needed some comfort, I needed it badly.

So I filled the tub, put some spicy ginger essential oil in my little red ceramic diffuser and brought the Amazon Echo dot into the bathroom and plugged it in. Settled in warm water, I asked Alexa to dim the lights; she did. I asked her to play soft music and she did that.

After a bit I asked her what time it was, and she told me. Alexa was being so accommodating and I wanted comfort so badly, that on a whim I pleaded: Alexa, read to me.

She did. To my surprise she started reading to me from the exact spot in my Kindle online reader at the last chapter I had left off. It was uncanny. I almost cried, I was in such pain and she was being so comfortingly helpful.

But she read my book in her voice, not in the voice of a professional audiobook narrator.

I'm reading the old classic Day of the Triffids, a densely written British book published in 1951 about mutant plants. It's sci fi, it's botany, it's restrained humorous English understatement narrated by a man, and there was Alexa in her chirpy, sweet feminine voice, all upbeat and earnest.

Her diction was almost but not quite perfect. Her pacing was completely natural but at one rate only, without the subtle pauses and breaks of a real speaker. Her mood was happy and friendly while reading about unimaginable dystopia and her mood was happy and friendly while reading mock British humor.

It was all firmly in the "uncanny valley" between very realistically human and slightly off.

But she read to me when I needed her to, and she read to me the way my mother probably would have read this book out loud to me, and she did it soothingly, without pause, while I was enveloped in warm water being miserable. Until the tub water cooled and I had to get out.