To Siri with Love

by Judith Newman

  That’s definitely edgy for Siri. But there is thought—a lot of thought—that goes into how Siri treats people who might be seeking information when they’re really upset. It’s still a work in progress, though. If you say, “I have been raped,” Siri brings up the number of a national rape crisis hotline. Ditto the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline if you say, “I want to kill myself.” But if you tell Siri, “I feel like killing my husband,” she says either “I don’t know how to respond to that”—or she tries to find a movie called Killing My Husband.

  * * *

  Of course, most of us simply use our phone’s personal assistants as an easy way to access information. For example, thanks to Henry and a question he asked Siri, I am now well-acquainted with a celebrity website called herbrasize.com.

  But the companionability of Siri is not limited to the communications-challenged. We’ve all found ourselves having little conversations with her (or him—you can make the voice male) at one time or another. Occasionally I see this in restaurants: people seemingly not insane talking to Siri on their phones or iPads.

  “Siri and I have a very strained relationship,” says one of my friends, the writer Nancy Jo Sales. “She’s very passive-aggressive with me and once I told her so. She said, ‘Nancy, I’m doing the best I can.’”

  “I was in the middle of a breakup and the guy was AWOL, and I was feeling a little sorry for myself,” says another pal, Emily Listfield. “It was midnight and I was noodling around on my iPhone and I asked Siri, ‘Should I call Richard?’ Like this app is a Ouija board. Guess what: not a Ouija board. The next thing I hear is ‘Calling Richard!’ and dialing. At which point I realized I was screwed. My daughter assured me there’s a two-second rule—the call doesn’t register if you hang up really fast—but I knew she was lying for my benefit.” Listfield has forgiven her Siri, and has recently considered changing her into a male voice. “But I’m worried he won’t answer when I ask a question. He’ll just pretend he doesn’t hear.”

  Siri can be oddly comforting, as well as chummy. “I was having a bad day and jokingly turned to Siri and said, ‘I love you,’ just to see what would happen and she answered, ‘You are the wind beneath my wings,’” says one friend. “And you know, it kind of cheered me up.”

  (Of course, I don’t know what my friend is talking about. Because I wouldn’t be at all cheered if I happened to ask Siri, in a low moment, “Am I ready for a face-lift?” and Siri answered, “You look fabulous.” That wouldn’t make any difference to me. Nope.)

  For most of us Siri is merely a momentary diversion. But for some it’s more. My son’s practice conversation with Siri is translating into more facility with actual humans. Recently I had the longest conversation with him that I’ve ever had. Admittedly, it was about different species of turtles, and whether I preferred the red-eared slider to the diamondback terrapin. This might not have been my choice of topic, but it was back and forth, and it followed a logical trajectory, and I can promise you that for most of my beautiful son’s years of existence that has not been the case.

  Developers of intelligent assistants have already recognized their uses to those with speech and communications problems—and some are thinking of new ways the assistants can help. According to the folks at SRI Technologies, the research and development company where Siri began before Apple bought the technology, the next generation of virtual assistant will not just retrieve and discuss information—it will be able to carry on more complex conversations about a person’s area of interest. “Your son will be able to proactively get information about whatever he’s interested in without asking for it, because the assistant will anticipate what he likes,” said Bill Mark, VP of information computing sciences at SRI who leads a team of researchers in developing this technology. Mark said that he also envisions assistants whose help is not only verbal but also visual. “For example, the assistant would be able to track eye movements, and help the autistic speaker learn to look you in the eye when talking,” he said. “See, that’s the wonderful thing about technology being able to help with some of these behaviors,” he adds. “Getting results requires a lot of repetition. Humans are not patient. Machines are very, very patient.”

  In fact, there is a new generation of virtual assistants specifically for children. By the time you read this Mattel will have introduced Aristotle, an AI personal assistant that you place in your kid’s room that is capable not only of playing favorite bedtime stories and music, but also of recognizing and adapting to young children’s voices in a way that standard assistants do not. Yes, there may be a danger here of outsourcing those tender bedtime moments to a robot. I know it sounds bad. But let’s get real here. How many of us would pay $300 for someone else to read Goodnight Moon for the four thousandth time?

  And there are assistants that go a step further. One in development takes a particularly interesting approach to kids on the spectrum. The hope is to use the kid’s obsession to expand his or her world. Only let me stop calling them “obsessions” or “perseverations,” the terms commonly used to describe the circumscribed interests of the person with ASD. Let’s call them “affinities.” That’s what the creator of this app, Ron Suskind, calls them. Suskind, whose book Life, Animated, and the Oscar-nominated documentary it inspired, chronicles how his autistic son, Owen, emerged from a nonverbal world via engagement with Disney characters, hates the pejorative term for a subject a person loves deeply. Is an obsession just an annoying nuisance? He doesn’t think so. Suskind believes an autistic person’s affinities can be “a pathway, not a prison.”

  Suskind’s app, Sidekicks, developed by the Affinity Project, works like this: Your child has the app on his phone, and so do you. He will click on it, and a subject of his interest will pop up; maybe it’ll be all about Star Wars movies or, you know, turtles. Your child can request a slice of a favorite book or movie or song, and a little avatar will pop up—the sidekick—and ask your child questions about it. What was the dragon thinking in this clip? Was he happy or sad? What does he want? Where are these turtles born? Etc., etc. Correct information will be programmed in, but there is also a “man behind the curtain”—an actual human answering the questions and engaging the child. The human—either the parent or, as time goes on, coaches who are hired to work with the app (speech therapists, psychologists)—answers the child’s questions, and questions and answers are recorded and accumulate over time. But the humans are typing or speaking answers, and the answer comes out in the voice and personality of the computer avatar/buddy—in the way that Suskind and his wife talked to Owen as Disney characters before he was ready to have regular conversations with them. As odd (and time-intensive) as it sounds, the sidekick plays to many autistic kids’ comfort with machines over human beings. Yes, you are again outsourcing some engagement with your child. But many of us need to, if we value our sanity. As Suskind’s wife, Cornelia, told him at one point, after hundreds of Dumbo viewings, “If I have to watch that movie one more time, I’m going to run away and join the circus.”

  Right now Sidekicks is still a pilot program. There is a waiting list of several thousand parents who want to test it. Companies responsible for Siri, Alexa, and other virtual assistants are aware of Sidekicks, and there are efforts to see how their technologies can be incorporated. Suskind hopes Sidekicks will be ready for more widespread use (Suskind sees it as a subscription service, maybe twenty bucks a month) by 2018, and hopes professionals who work with the ASD population will want to learn how to use it to work with their clients. I kind of hope that the avatars will expand to be specific characters Gus will want to connect with—a subway train, maybe, or Lady Gaga. (Frankly, who wouldn’t want to have Lady Gaga explain life to you?) But regardless of that, there is something deeply cheering about the idea of Sidekicks. A buddy even more customizable than Siri who will eventually get to know the likes and dislikes of his particular Hero intimately. That’s what Suskind calls the kid/end user: the Hero. Why? “It was my son Owen’s idea,”
Suskind tells me. “It’s his understanding of Disney characters and their sidekicks: ‘A sidekick helps a hero fulfill his destiny.’”

  I asked Mark whether he knew if any of the people who worked on Siri’s language development at Apple were on the spectrum. “Well, of course I don’t know for certain,” he said thoughtfully. “But, when you think about it, you’ve just described half of Silicon Valley.”

  It is a slow process, but I am accepting that what gives my guy happiness are not necessarily the same things that give me happiness. Right now, at a time when humans can be a little overwhelming even for the average kid, Siri makes Gus happy. She is his sidekick. One night as he was going to bed there was this matter-of-fact exchange:

  Gus: Siri, will you marry me?

  Siri: I’m not the marrying kind.

  Gus: I mean, not now. I’m a kid. I mean when I’m grown up.

  Siri: My end-user agreement does not include marriage.

  Gus: Oh, OK.

  Gus didn’t sound too disappointed. This was useful information to have—and for me, too, since it was the first time I knew that he actually thought about marriage. He turned over to go to sleep:

  Gus: Good night, Siri, will you sleep well tonight?

  Siri: I don’t need much sleep, but it’s nice of you to ask.

  Very nice.

  Eleven

  Work It

  “Do you know any prostitutes?” Henry asks.

  Over time I’ve learned that what Henry asks and what I think he’s asking are not necessarily the same thing. So I try to think before I answer. This time, I figure, he’s asking about social classes, so I answer carefully. I tell him I do know several former prostitutes, and I launch into my lecture about how people sometimes do jobs at one point in their lives they wouldn’t do at another, and while the work can be awful and exploitive, it can also be rewarding to some women. You can’t make any assumptions about intelligence or morality. “The preferred term is ‘sex worker,’” I add primly.

  “OK,” he says. “But do you know any male prostitutes? And can they make a living without being gay?”

  I then realize we’re not talking about morality or class or race or politics. We’re at Career Day.

  “You cannot make a good living as a straight male prostitute, and even if you could this wouldn’t be a good choice for you,” I said.

  “You always told me I could be anything I wanted to be,” he said, a little sulkily.

  I guess I had been talking a little too much about finding a future career. But I couldn’t help it. Freud said the two most important things in life are work and love, and I couldn’t agree more. I have been working since I was twelve, when my parents got me a newspaper route around our suburban neighborhood. Being unathletic, I couldn’t balance a bike with a huge basketful of papers, so my mother slowly trailed after me every morning in her car, holding on to most of my stash of papers and thus allowing me to do my job. While I never wanted to babysit, because I didn’t like or understand children, at one point I figured I had to. I lied about my age by a few years and nobody checked. I ended up babysitting for a precocious boy who was about six months older than I was. He was on to me. This made for awkward bedtimes.

  Mostly, though, my parents got me dog-sitting jobs. We didn’t really ask too many questions beforehand about the dogs I cared for, which is why I’m lucky I was never maimed. I still remember a springer spaniel named Bella: once she’d eaten, she’d retreat to the back of my mother’s closet. Safely ensconced in fake fur and polyester, she’d growl ominously if anyone approached the closet. My mother had to wait until Bella was out of the closet before she could get dressed. Sometimes she could entice her out with a tennis ball. We called this tactic “Bella of the Ball” because we were such geniuses.

  By the time I got to high school, I stopped relying on my parents to get me jobs. These days, high schoolers burnish their college applications with exotic internships. But this was before privileged teenagers could be sent to observe meerkat fields in the Kalahari Desert, so I was selling midprice handbags in a mall. I loved this job. I started out every day with a sinister thought: What is the ugliest bag in this store, and can I sell it? This goal would consume my day. But after a few weeks of this, I began feeling sorry for the bags, sorry that I had thought of them that way. So instead of looking for women I didn’t like to buy my ugly bags—say, the Dallas handbag inexplicably shaped like a telephone, complete with cutting-edge push buttons instead of a rotary dial—I began targeting Purse Angels, nice people who would give my Charlie Brown leather goods a forever home. I began to take it very personally when women turned up their noses at whatever I praised. Fortunately I only did this job for one school year, and never revealed my state of mind to the woman who owned the store. But being emotionally invested in cheap leather goods made me realize that perhaps sales was not my calling.

  But no matter, I liked to work. I couldn’t imagine not working. A solitary person, but one who was nevertheless deeply nosey, I loved how a job enabled me to engage with people and ask questions that would have been impolite otherwise. What occasion do you need this purse for? Your son’s wedding? Congratulations! How do you feel about the bride? You don’t like her? TELL ME MORE.

  Since many of my fondest memories of high school involved not hanging out with friends on weekends but clocking into some job, I couldn’t help but feel that that was the key to happiness for my own kids. Sometime. In the future. Or maybe now, at least for Henry? I reminded him, perhaps a bit too frequently, that he is someone who likes material possessions. I showed him his Christmas list versus Gus’s list that I had saved from when they were ten years old:

  Henry: Club penguin cards; alot of stuff; play mobile; froot loops; presents; Pez; 100 buks, pokemon cards; morio and sonik at the Olimpic winter games, a DS, an iPhone, ds games, a Scotland uniform, I pod touch.

  Gus: I want Daddy to come home.

  “So, you’re the kind of person who needs a lot of money.”

  “Mom, have you noticed that I’m fourteen years old? Who is going to hire me to do anything at fourteen?” he said. When he started in with this entirely reasonable argument, I pulled out my Matthew Freud story. Matthew Freud—great-grandson of Sigmund, former husband of Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth, notorious bad boy—runs one of the largest PR companies in the UK. Years ago I interviewed him, and he told me that his first job was at nine, selling mice to kids at a local school event. Then, when infuriated parents came back to him with their child’s “pet,” he would take the mice back—if the parents paid him. Now that’s entrepreneurship.

  “You want me to sell mice? Now I’m confused,” Henry said.

  “It’s not the mice. It’s the gumption. Matthew Freud was only nine years old. You are fourteen. We can think of something for you.”

  Henry has all the tools necessary to work right now. And he does make money. Unfortunately, he makes it playing poker and taking sucker bets from his friends. One day he came home with $150 and a smile on his face. It was some football bet. He explained its intricacies, and while I didn’t understand it entirely, I did understand that somehow, even if Henry were to lose, his friend Joey would owe him fifty dollars. “See, I’m selling him my football draft pick, and at fifty dollars, that’s a deep discount,” Henry explained.

  My Nathan Detroit plays in two fantasy football leagues. One is a bunch of kids from his high school. The other is a group of attorneys from Goldman Sachs. He was invited through a family friend. I tried not to learn anything about it beyond that. But my point is, if he’s not kneecapped before he’s eighteen, he will eventually find a job and be OK.

  And then there is Gus. Gus, whose interests and skills are limited. Gus, who is still a little unclear about what is real and what is make-believe, who thinks that everyone is his friend, who has no idea about sarcasm or competition or envy or ambition. Or the value of money.

  * * *

  “Bye, I’m going to work!” Gus says after dinner
, as he has for the last three years. And work he does, for as long as the doorman who’s on that night will let him. I don’t know when he got it into his head to be a doorman, but once that idea was there, it stuck.

  At first it must have been rather startling, this tiny kid who would don the doorman’s jacket and sit at the front desk. But now everyone knows him, and Gus takes the job seriously. He knows the name of everyone in the building, their dogs, their apartment numbers. He knows all the food deliverymen. The moment a person comes into the building, Gus checks the computer to see if they have a package, lets them know, and gets it from the mailroom if they do. No amount of insistence on my part can make him understand that it’s rude to ask people where they are going or what they are doing that night, or who this “new person” they’ve come in with is—a particular problem for one man in the building who is known for having a parade of paid companions. Gus stops all the deliverymen, including the guy who delivers weed to half the building; I believe he’s told Gus he works for Grubhub.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get him in the union eventually,” says Jen, my most loving and lovely neighbor. This is unlikely. If Gus saw someone come into the building with a gun, he’d probably ask the guy what kind of gun it was and what street he bought it on. Gus can do every part of a doorman’s job except the part that involves keeping people out. He’d undoubtedly welcome Charles Manson with a smile and a wave.

  * * *

  “Job.” J-O-B. That word has music and beauty to me. It is not just about making money. It is knowing your kid will have a place in the world. Before having Gus, I read Studs Terkel’s wonderful 1974 book Working, in which he interviewed dozens of workers in a variety of industries. The idea that resonated most came from an editor he interviewed: “Most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.”