Alexa B. Jordan
If in recent years, Alexa lost its voice or took the form of a quilter from antiquity, in this year’s Amazon Alexa Super Bowl ad (at least as of now), Amazon is in search of Alexa’s body. One engineer anthropomorphizes it as Michael B. Jordan. Then, there’s a jealous husband and other old tropes.
It reminds me a lot of the sketches from a decade or more ago about wives being jealous of the GPS. The idea of having a celebrity voice as the persona of a tech device isn’t new. Waze made a big splash when it opened up navigation to voice from Kevin Hart and Samuel L. Jackson, among others.
To kind of paraphrase Jackson… I’ve had enough of these celebrity voices in these tech devices.
However, what’s new going forward is that even if Alexa doesn’t put Michael B. Jordan’s voice or body to use, the interaction with these devices is going to be even more realistic and may within 5 years be at the Her-level of quality. It may then sound like us or someone new altogether who we’d respect and respond well to.
In that case, maybe our jealously won’t be so misplaced.
