Wired for Speech

“With Wired for Speech, Clifford Nass and Scott Brave have done a brilliant job of tracing the implications of the intensely social nature of speech for the burgeoning arena of voice interface systems. Anyone interested in these systems would do well to read this book.”–Robert B. Cialdini, Arizona State University, author of Influence: Science and Practice “I found Wired for Speech absolutely fascinating, full of amazing insights. It tells us that the more we are forced to learn how to interact with computers, the more we learn about the most human part of ourselves: that we are not only the masters but the slaves of speech.”–Robert MacNeil, coauthor, Do You Speak American? “This is a deeply insightful and immensely useful tour of what is sure to become the most important human-machine interface. As someone who thought he knew all about speech interaction, I was nonetheless surprised again and again as I read through it. Remember 2001? Well, if Hal’s fictional designers had read Wired for Speech, Hal not only would have brought his ship’s crew back alive, he would have delivered a flawless Academy Award speech as well!”–Paul Saffo, Director, Institute for the Future “Should a computer refer to itself as ‘I’? Questions such as these are philosophical, with implications that range from the social to the psychodynamic. In this dense and fascinating work, they are treated empirically: in a series of systematic investigations, the voice of the machine emerges as a new evocative object for thinking about how people actively draw the line between human and artificial. A compelling contribution to our understanding of computer-human relationships – now and in the years to come.”–Sherry Turkle, MIT, author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet

Clifford Nass is Professor, Department of Communication, and Codirector, Kozmetsky Global Collaboratory, at Stanford University. He is the author of The Media Equation- How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places.Scott Brave is Chief Technology Officer at Baynote, Inc.

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