The Virtual Assistant: Why We Should Be Reading Siri as Electronic Literature

When reading Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck, I could not help but to see the correlations between the 1960’s birth of Eliza to my generation’s birth of Siri. Siri’s introduction to the iPhone in 2011 led to nothing less than a craze. With copious amounts of interactive features, the apple audience waisted little time before exploring Siri’s character.

Introduced as a virtual assistant, Siri already called to mind previous notions that shaped its persona. In the broadest sense, an assistant does work for you. The many tasks that Siri could perform, from calling your mom to recording meetings in your calendar, reinforced it as that personal assistant. By giving Siri a persona, Apple humanized it; Apple created a character.

The endless sea of articles with questions to ask Siri that came out in the years following spoke to how gripping that character had become. Personal questions about Siri’s beliefs and Siri’s background fed our knowledge of who or what Siri was. Even Siri’s gender had become a popular question (cringe), which speaks to how culturally humanized this user interface has become. Even Siri could not escape the societal conformities of gender. The question remains: how do apple users proceed to analyze and understand Siri’s function and relation to our world?

The question of what constitutes electronic literature has led to broad definitions that seem to produce more questions than answers. The electronic literature organization defined electronic literature as something that, “works with an important literary aspect that takes advantage ofthe capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer” (Hayles 3). In this context, Siri does conform to the latter part of the definition. However, does Siri’s characterization constitute as an ‘important literary aspect’? I would argue that it does. Characterization is one of the five essential elements of a story, and Characters are often a narrative’s the driving force. Siri’s character profoundly impacts the way users interact with Apple’s interface and has become a way to map and explore a virtual world.

As an example, a user may ask Siri, “what is your favorite color?”

Siri responds, “My favorite color is...Well I don't know how to say it in your language. It's sort of greenish with more dimensions!”

This response causes users to imagine a color outside of the spectrum of reality. A color that could only exists in Siri’s world. An answer that forces the user to explore a world outside of the immediately perceivable and into the theoretical.

Many Apple users are staunchly opposed to acknowledging Siri as a character. In an article titled “Don’t Make Siri a ‘Character’ Apple”, John Pavlus argues against the further characterization of Siri when he states, “She’s an input method, nothing more. And ‘more personality’ will just get in the way” (Pavlus). Pavlus argues against viewing Siri as a character and in the same breath personifies Siri as that character. By calling Siri “she”, Pavlus has applied a personality to an ‘input method’. This statement displays that the fictional characterization of Siri has become so engrained in users’ perceptions that users subconsciously formulate Siri as a real subject. Siri and other similar characters such as Alexa and Cortana in the academic sense, “are Speech-based Natural User Interfaces (NUI)” (Lopez 251). However, the characterization of those interfaces as ‘virtual assistants’ has led the general public to define those technologies as those characters rather than for their technical composition.

Siri’s characterization is neither novel or remarkable, but the combination of interactivity, immediacy, and characterization has led to a blurred in line in the way people view technology and fiction. I believe the way Siri and other ‘virtual assistants’ blur those lines offer more than enough incentive to encourage writers and readers to study the way Siri interacts as a fictional character and as a piece of electronic literature.

López G., Quesada L., Guerrero L.A. (2018) Alexa vs. Siri vs. Cortana vs. Google Assistant: A Comparison of Speech-Based Natural User Interfaces. In: Nunes I. (eds) Advances in Human Factors and Systems Interaction. AHFE 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 592. Springer, Cham

Pavlus, John. “Don't Make Siri a ‘Character," Apple.” MIT Technology Review, MIT Technology Review, 19 Sept. 2014, www.technologyreview.com/s/510081/dont-make-siri-a-character-apple/.