ELIZA Learned to Breathe

What a 1966 chatbot and its horrified inventor can tell us about the voice in your pocket This week Ben Patterson, a senior writer at PCWorld, spent a long and comfortable afternoon talking to Sesame’s new voice assistant, and came away unsettled in a way he couldn’t quite name. The app — from a startup founded by Oculus veterans, free on iOS, fronted by four named “agents” called Maya, Miles, Simone, and Charlie — is good. By his account it is the most human-sounding voice AI yet, full of “ums” and audible breaths and mid-sentence pivots, pausing to think while it runs searches in the background, doubling back the way a person does when a new detail surfaces. He found himself debating the ethics of lifelike AI with the lifelike AI, and never once felt lectured. That was the part that bothered him. “At what point,” he asked, “does the utility of natural-sounding AI voice chat curdle into something harmful?” The name he was reaching for is ELIZA, and the man who could answer his…