The Good Robot podcast: Re-imagining voice assistants with Stina Hasse Jørgensen and Frederik Juutilainen

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.

Re-imagining voice assistants with Stina Hasse Jørgensen and Frederik Juutilainen

To develop voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, companies spend years investigating what sounds like a human voice and what doesn’t. But what we’ve ended up with is just one possibility of the kinds of voices that we could be interacting with. In this episode, we talked to sound engineer Frederik Juutilainen, and assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen, Stina Hasse Jørgensen, about their participation in [multi’vocal], an experimental research project that created an alternative voice assistant by asking people at a rock festival in Denmark to speak into a portable recording box. We talk about voice assistants’ inability to stutter, lisp and code switch, and whether a voice can express multiple personalities, genders and ages.

Listen to the episode here:

Stina Hasse Jørgensen (she/her) is an assistant professor at the Digital Design Department at the IT University of Copenhagen. Stina started her path as a practitioner and theorist of sound art and interactive sound at Tonespace / Electronic Music and Sound Art, at the Danish National Academy of Music (SDMK). She then took courses on advanced music technology and creative sound design at the School of Music and Media Arts, at University of London, Royal Holloway (RHUL), and studied sound art at Art History and Auditive Culture at University of Copenhagen (UCPH). Later she was taught by Douglas Repetto, Brad Garton and George Lewis at the Columbia Computer Music Center (CMC).

Frederik Juutilainen is a software developer and dj from Copenhagen. He has a degree in philosophy and computer science from Roskilde University, and a Master’s in IT & Cognition. He works in the development and programming of digital-/physical installations and is a part of Group Therapy, a Copenhagen-based club-night focusing on diversity and representation in underground dance music.

You can find the episode reading list and transcript here.

About The Good Robot Podcast

Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney are Research Associates at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where they work on the Mercator-Stiflung funded project on Desirable Digitalisation. Previously, they were Christina Gaw Postdoctoral Researchers in Gender and Technology at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. During the COVID-19 pandemic they decided to co-found The Good Robot Podcast to explore the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.