A strange duet

A strange duet

Ed Sheeran sings with Alexa. Time to stop worrying and learn to love the machine?

Ed Sheeran just dumped Justin Bieber, for Alexa. The gingerhaired Englishman’s new album is a collaborations project, with one of its biggest billed songs being the collaboration with Bieber, ‘I don’t care’. But in a new version of the song, the dulcet Bieber is replaced by Amazon’s Alexa. Like Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana, Alexa is an intelligent virtual assistant – with a computer generated rather than human voice. Critics say that the new song sounds very strange, because he is so honeyed and she is so monotonic. But strangeness is also to many people’s taste, and even Beliebers are giving Alexa a listen.

Today Alexa is making headlines by singing. The other day she was creeping out people by laughing randomly, when they didn’t even know she could laugh. Like melody or art, laughter has long been seen as an essentially human attribute. In the Star Trek franchise, this is why Spock and Data just don’t get humour. Neither do they sing. So until now, it hasn’t seemed possible that artificial intelligence could script the Kapil Sharma show or Gol Maal – surely only humans can be Shakespeares and Hrishikesh Mukherjees and Beethovens and Amrita Sher-Gils?

But the chatbots are so darned convenient. Siri, what do pandas eat? Alexa, play Shape of You. Really, these are the kinds of things toddlers are saying. And adults? “I can deal with the bad nights, when I'm with my baby, yeah.” Those who have given up talking for texting, may be more than ready to love a machine, in further inroads of the virtual into the real. It’s not everyone’s dream duet. But it’s playing everywhere now.