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The first two panes of today's Non Sequitur:



The rest of the strip:

Of course, the snappy repartee from Siri, Alexa and other digital assistants is scripted by human designers, so in fact some subversive human designer could actually put the equivalent of that dialogue into the system. In fact, they may well have done so.



8 Comments

  1. charles antaki said,

    July 22, 2018 @ 9:09 am

    Snappy indeed. But even if a human designer might be behind it, they would be hard-pressed to make the machine catch the deictic references and cope with the context that builds up behind the barflies' queries. A familiar complaint. There's some nice research, though, on how people actually do incorporate Alexa-type interfaces into their ordinary (often argumentative) lives, e.g. here:
    .

  2. charles antaki said,

    July 22, 2018 @ 9:10 am

    Apologies – I hope this URL now appears:
    https://rolsi.net/guest-blogs/guest-blog-talking-with-alexa-at-home/

  3. tony in san diego said,

    July 22, 2018 @ 10:16 am

    SIRI: Skynet Is Really Imminent!

  4. Jerry Friedman said,

    July 22, 2018 @ 4:28 pm

    How does the cartoonist know the digital assistant misspelled "meatsicle" (or "meat-sicle")? The only word I can think of that takes the suffix "sickle" is "motor".

  5. KB said,

    July 22, 2018 @ 4:40 pm

    "Meat-sickle" made me think of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/corpsicle. But I'm still puzzled as to what it's meant to mean here.

  6. Kate Gladstone said,

    July 22, 2018 @ 4:59 pm

    I think a “meat-sickle” is meant to suggest “a popsicle made of meat.”

  7. Keith said,

    July 23, 2018 @ 2:02 am

    @Jerry,

    What about Hamren?

  8. Victor said,

    July 23, 2018 @ 1:46 pm

    In the movie The Fifth Element, there's this bit of dialog:

    Police: Are you classified as human?
    Korben Dallas: Negative, I am a meat popsicle.

    Korbin Dallas is the Bruce Willis character.

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