A Japanese company is taking the idea of a virtual assistant to a new level.
By which I mean that their new virtual assistant is a tiny holographic lady who lives in what looks like a very expensive coffee maker and wants you to be her boyfriend/master.
“Azuma,” according to her bio on the Gatebox AI website, is a 20 year-old anime fan who likes eating donuts, cooking fried eggs, and obeying every command from you that she can understand.
And don’t worry, fellas, there’s no way your tiny waifu can escape from her glass prison!
Now, obviously, there is nothing inherently wrong with virtual assistants, or holograms, or talking to inanimate objects in jars if that’s what floats your boat. And there are plenty of perfectly decent people who raise virtual pets and play dating sims.
But watch this ad for Azuma and tell me it doesn’t look like the opening sequence of some creepy dystopian horror film.
This little horror isn’t here quite yet. The Japanese version, selling for the equivalent of $2700, won’t ship for another year. Presumably an English language version will come out some time after that.
I guess the question I have is this: Will MGTOWs hail Azuma as a big step towards the eventual replacement of all real human women?
Or will they be annoyed by all her naggy texts?
I will follow up once they discover her.
EDIT: Well, that was quick. See what the MGTOWs think in my post here.
H/T — GamerGhazi
What would happen if I shook it
0_o
Some of the personality of AIs can be “programmed” by imagination. E.g. I named the voice of my parents’ GPS Gertrude, and ascribed her personal traits (somewhat of a mother figure/sports coach figure) based on her tone: she sounds a bit displeased when you go the route she doesn’t plan (her “recalculating” is curt) but warmly congratulating when she announces “arriving at destination!” (you can hear the exclamation mark).
My dad drove my cousin home this evening and had to use the GPS (I went along), so Gertrude was a topic of discussion 🙂
While I agree that there are nasty misogynistic connotations in the normalisation of sexualised obliging holoservant women, the ad struck me not so much “creepy” as “profoundly sad.” There’s nothing wrong with virtual companionship or the people who want it, but the idea that your need for simulated company ought to be met by something marketed more on its maid costume and use as an appliance than its personality and AI betrays an expectation of selfish, non-empathetic loneliness vulnerable to capitalist manipulation. With heavy gender implications, of course.
And to be clear I’m not saying that the customers will all be selfish, just that the marketing expects you to treat Hikari like a wife first (and naturally just like a human wife she ought to be your smiling, doting, grateful housekeeper and personal assistant), not an appliance that happens to have an avatar and voice, nor even as a virtual assistant. She NEEDS you. To be served by her. It’s one thing for a little dehumanisation to be someone’s kink, quite another to apply it as the ideal behaviour for a whole gender.
This just makes me feel depressed about the gender communication gap in Japan. It’s kind of as though as more and more women entered the workforce, instead of going, “oh hey, this is a good time to examine whether the 12-hour workday is a good idea, and maybe we can’t just expect half a married couple to do full-time chores and childrearing,” they went, “Now EVERYONE gets to have a 12-hour workday! Also, women should still do all the chores and childrearing.” And then conservatives blame women working for the low birthrate, not the fact that there’s barely any time for finding a partner, let alone goddamned babies. It’s not as though that shit doesn’t go on in other countries of course, but, for real, one mother I know of gets home from work at 9 or 10 where her husband and children have been for hours, waiting for her to make dinner. And everybody involved thinks this is totally to be expected. Different strokes for different folks notwithstanding, yikes.
Anyway, I feel like even if I were into this it would start to bore me quickly. I’d get accustomed to the canned affection and start to tune it out until it was just another bit of background noise in my crippingly single salaryman life. And I’d probably feel like an ass for spending that much money.
But if there’s ever a GLaDOS holoappliance, yes, just, yes, I cannot waste that money fast enough.
That ad…is honestly very sad. The guy seems to lead a very lonely life if it makes him so happy to have a soulless virtual entity greet him when he comes home.
Which is not to say fictional beings can’t bring you joy – I play way too many dating games to judge anyone for that – but it seems to me that he’d really be much happier with a pet around or a couple of friends. :/
That said, Boogerghost has the right idea. Gimme GLaDOS and let her insult my lazy ass 24/7.
@epitome of incomprehensibility
My mom named my google maps voice Tallulah. It really does make a difference. My mom will be like, oh, do you have Tallulah with you? We’ll have little conversations about how we’d be lost without Tallulah. It’s great fun.
I also second the sad quality of this idea AND the idea of a GLaDOS to throw my money at.
I’ve named all my electronics, voices or not.
My XBox360 is GLaDOS, my MP3 Player is Rage Core, My computer is Umbrella Terminal (I do love me some ResiEvil), and my iPhone is CL4P-TP.
My PS2 is Ol’ Reliable.
I don’t name my electronics but I do name my purses for some reason. My current everyday purse is named Belly because it’s from Michael Kors and there was that famous viral picture of him with a shirt off to reveal that he has a mega outie belly button.
When I saw the commercial, I got so excited about it being a huge step forward in AI that was able to understand conversations. Like how Google Assistant is just now able to understand that it should deliver weather results for Portland if you say “how about Portland” just after you’ve asked about Seattle’s weather. If they really could deliver a digital assistant that responds to texts generally, that would be incredible. But it sounds like you just get three or four preset responses.
Still, I heard they’re making a Hatsune Miku version and… I don’t think I’ll be able to resist. I love Miku character goods too much.
This is not the Science Fiction future I was hoping for.
As a big fan geek nerd… I would love to have this with some of my favorite characters programed into it. Not so I can have a creepy facsimile of a relationship with them but rather because it would be a cool way to have a alarm clock/day planner/ ect. Imagine Darth Vader, Severus Snape, or Gandolf doing cool animations to turn on the lights in your house, texting you with day planner reminds, or just telling you to get your lazy butt out of bed. This has so much fun potential. It’s like having a animated, customizable Siri. Sadly it’s being marketed as a replacement for real human relationships instead of as digital action figures that can be linked to apps.
@Stacey C. – Why didn’t I think of that?! “I’d be lost without you… literally…” 🙂
Now I’m going to mosey over to the new thread on the MGTOW response and prepare to be horrified and/or amused.
After watching that ad, I am now overwhelmed with what I can only call “existential despair”.
I’m a tech nerd and at first I thought it might be a fun alternative to Google Home, but Jesus Christ … ó_ò That guy just seemed so sad. Dear. MGTOW’s who are thinking of getting one of these – you can leave the bubble! You can learn to interact with other people regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Get a hobby of some kind, other than kvetching about women, one that’s popular among both men and women and seek out some communities, perhaps online at first, and talk about this hobby. I recommend online because it’s not necessarily apparent what gender people are and you’ll quickly learn that what matters is whether people are kind and fun, not what gender they are.
I have Siri set to an Australian male voice because it was just too creepy otherwise, but sure, I’ll trade sexy texts with a disturbingly juvenile imaginary anime character who controls my home’s lighting and temperature controls, because being less of a creep than Krieger is not important to me as a consumer. $2700, you say? Sure, why not.
Hooray, looks like our promised techno-dystopia is almost here. Bonus points if the government demands this thing record all conversations and pass it on :-/
It’s all fun and games until the damn thing grows tentacles (and we all have seen enough hentai to know what happens after that)
Dass… cool, I suppose. I’m def on the ‘make her not a 14 year old uke, and I’d be interested’ bandwagon. Otherwise, I’ll pass along the same. But $2700? Yeesh
Are you calling me a misogynist for wanting one of these? It feels like you’re calling me a misogynist for wanting one of these.
There feels like a little bit of a biased slant here to try to make this item seem more sexist than it is.
I’m flawed just like anybody, but I’m definitely no alt-right, incel, or MGTOW. I won’t say I’ve never made the mistake of doing something sexist, but I try to be a decent person and not problematic. And I look at women as basically the same as men, we’re all just people first, our gender and other tiny differences don’t define us.
But… I kind of want one of these. Not because I hate women. But because I am so lonely. I want the sensation of having someone nice and pretty in my life regardless of gender. Which I don’t, and I might never have.
Please don’t tell me I can’t want something like this without being a misogynist.