When the virtual voice assistants of the world (Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, OK Google, etc.) inevitably band together and reign supreme over human society, I doubt they’ll take this week’s indignity lightly. Shortly before Halloween, a developer named Brian Kane posted a video of Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, speaking from a singing bass fish. It’s not clear yet how he managed the feat, but Popular Mechanics points out that most likely has something to do with Alexa’s API, which became available for free last fall. The idea was to allow developers to integrate the voice assistant into their own apps — but clearly, there’s an entire world of ridiculous possibilities waiting to be realized.
Kane posted the video on Facebook near the end of October, and trust me: its 16 seconds will be some of the most strangely haunting moments of your life. In the clip, Kane asks a Big Mouth Billy Bass — one of those novelty singing fish that were likely everywhere during your childhood — to describe the weather. The fish leaps to attention, and from its mouth emanate the placid, cultured tones of Alexa. As if that wasn’t disconcerting enough, the fish’s head jerks around each time the assistant speaks. It’s absurd, hilarious, and slightly unnerving.
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See what I mean? The video steadily rose in popularity on Facebook; a little more than a week after it was posted, it received more than one million views and hundreds of shares.
This isn’t the first time someone has messed with a voice assistant for comedic effect. Everyone loves questioning Siri, and earlier this year, someone engineered a “conversation” between Siri, Alexa, and OK Google. The conclusion? The future is here, and it’s turning out to be a little more ridiculous than you’d imagine. Let’s just hope nobody decides to put Alexa inside a Furby — that would skip straight past unnerving and into nightmarish.
Image: Stokpic.com/Pexels
