Illustration by Benze
In the entryway to Hollywood’s Magic Castle, if you speak a secret password into a small sculpture of an owl, a bookcase will revolve and reveal a secret door. If you walk through that door, past a bar that’s usually packed, sleeve-to-sleeve, with magicians who have nothing up their sleeves, you will find the famous magic clubhouse’s haunted music room: a gilded salon, decorated with stained glass, gilt picture frames, crushed velvet settees, and an historic baby grand piano.
Since the Magic Castle’s opening day 53 years ago in 1963, that piano has been played by the invisible, friendly ghost of Irma, a dead girl who, legend has it, was a friend of the home’s original owners and loved the piano so much that not even her death in 1932 could keep her away from it. Walk in on any given night in 2016, and people still stand around gawking at the miracle of music played by the ghost in the machine.
“Irma,” you might say, “Can you play something romantic?”
The piano will spring to life and play a tune to match your request, suit your mood, or wittily answer your question. Especially if you drop a buck in the tip jar.
Irma, meet Alexa.
Amazon’s Alexa is Irma’s spiritual sister: the digital ghost in Amazon’s new voice-activated devices who communes in the cloud with the spectral Internet of things.
Alexa makes every home a magic castle.
Alexa Amuses! Amazes! Entertains!
Amazon Echo
Alexa, Amazon’s cloud-based, voice-activated software, outdoes Irma by playing not one but three voice-activated instruments: Echo, Dot, and Tap. I’ve spent six weeks with the Echo, a 360-degree speaker in the shape of a small black column, equipped with an array of seven microphones that detect your voice with an almost spooky accuracy, even from across the room, or while it’s playing music. (The Tap is smaller and portable; Dot, a hockey-puckish satellite, extends the range of an Echo or Tap.)
As with Irma, music is, by far, Alexa’s most compelling trick — thanks to seamless integration with Spotify, Pandora, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, and others. Every morning now, I wake up and ask Alexa to predict the weather, sum up the news, tell me the scores of last night’s games, or to play either my local radio station WNYC, a favorite playlist, or music by a favorite artist. I speak to her just as I might request a song from Irma: “Alexa, play Jamie XX.” “Alexa, play my evening playlist on Spotify.” She’s capable of much more, but she does simple tasks best: In the kitchen, I’ve asked Alexa to set timers, read books, and tell dumb jokes to my daughter. And what has amazed and astounded me, as a carnival talker might tout, is that this modern marvel actually works.
Three things separate Alexa from Siri and other such systems: Accuracy, the primacy of voice interaction, and fun.
In daily use, Alexa is just better at taking orders than the competition, particularly if the requests are straightforward. She rarely screwed up basic commands in six weeks of my testing — and apparently in the experience of most people, according to professional reviews and the 35,000 mostly breathless consumer reviews on Amazon. I rarely have to ask a question twice, and almost never have to ask her three times.
An amateur magician might be able to pull off a card trick most of the time. A pro magician can pull off that trick nearly every time. But a star can pull off tricks with effortless showmanship, which is what Alexa does, over and over.
Amazon DotAlexa shrinks the gap between person and product precisely because she’s designed for conversation. I’ve never been fooled into thinking I speak the same language as my Xbox Kinect, and I’ve muzzled Siri because it seems silly to speak, haltingly, when I can do so much more using her primary interface: my thumbs. With Alexa, I’m almost never tempted to open her awkward smartphone app and clumsy web interface. In fact, the lameness of Amazon’s ugly software is practically a perk: Alexa is built to listen; there is no better way to get what you want. You have to talk to her.
Just as Irma’s piano would be a mere jukebox or player piano if it had buttons to press, Alexa’s Echo turns its lack of a touchscreen interface into an advantage. If I could control the Echo with buttons or a touchscreen, it would feel less mystical. When I use the Alexa app, I’m reminded that I’m basically interacting with the most ubiquitous and boring of gifts: a wireless Bluetooth speaker.
But little about Alexa is boring, at least not now. Absent clumsy miscommunication, Alexa’s voice-control gimmick, as with Irma’s, becomes both the function and the fun. Perhaps if Alexa was limited to me barking GPS queries at her while stressed behind the wheel, or her guiding me through some aggravating customer-service phone system, I wouldn’t be so amused. But Alexa, like other breakthrough devices (Walkman, iPod, iPad, etc.) does amuse me. Amazon aimed straight at entertainment, and I think that’s why Alexa is such a success, and the foibles so forgivable.
I can’t remember the last time a device changed my daily routine, and yet, I don’t feel like I’m living in some life-hacked, Soylent-fueled, standing-desk future of ergonomic efficiency. When I talk to Alexa, I don’t get a servant-master vibe. Mostly, she’s not meeting a need; she’s providing a bonus. It’s more like watching an entertainer perform — whether she’s conjuring music, a weather report, or an Uber pickup from thin air.
Amazon TapI’ve come to think of Alexa less as a personal assistant than as a damn delightful novelty act: a star in this new Internet of Things, the ringmaster in a thousand-ring circus of interconnected devices and services, from lights to thermostats to music to shops, taxis, and restaurants. She was born to entertain, to set the mood, to shoot the shit.
“If Vaudeville died,” *M*A*S*H\ co-creator Larry Gelbart once said, “television was the box they put it in.”
Now there’s no box or a thousand boxes, and our gadgets themselves are often the amusements. Videogames? Midway games. Sims? Flea circuses. Robot toys? Animal acts. ____ Snapchat filters? Quick-change acts. Drones? Daredevil acts. What-happens-next-will amaze-you headline writers? Carnival talkers.
A nimble performer, Alexa learns new tricks every week. Amazon even calls these voice-controlled applications “Skills”: Each one a different miniature act, a little feat of derring-do or wit. Alexa can play millions of songs, like a pianoman. As carnival hustler, Alexa can guess my weight to the ounce (with my connected Fitbit Aria scale) and predict my future, if I were so inclined (thanks to Elle horoscopes). By connecting to a lighting system like Hue, Alexa can put on a light show (like a cooler Clapper). Alexa can read from a Kindle or Audible audiobook, queue up a favorite podcast, or trigger any IFTTT recipe, which can extend Alexa’s control to a vast range of applications, from personal calendars and security systems to online banking.
Alexa can also connect to your fridge, thermostat, garage door opener, security system, and checking account, but that all seems pretty dull to me. I’m drawn to Alexa’s fun side: the music, storytelling, and even her most amateurish Skills. Many of Alexa’s existing Skills are cheap gags — more the stuff of sideshows than the big tent. Say, “Alexa, tell me a yo mamma joke,” and she will tell a yo mamma joke. Say, “Alexa, play boo,” and Alexa will utter a chorus of boos. Alexa will play Jeopardy with you, host a spelling bee, or trigger an iffy choose-your-own-adventure-style game set in Gotham City. These more-promising-than-satisfying skills remind me of a precocious child’s goofy early efforts, before the kid turns prodigy and leaves its teachers in the dust.
For now, Alexa has a lot to learn. Music, and audio in general, is by far Alexa’s greatest strength — partly because it’s an aural product, but also because when you’re picking out a favorite playlist or asking Alexa to play an old Jay-Z track, the stakes are so low that little mistakes seem trivial. If Alexa were your office assistant, you might fire her for small mistakes affecting your finances or calendar. (This is why I won’t be using the Skills for Fidelity Investments or Capital One banking.) But when Alexa is simply performing for your pleasure, it can seem downright rude and ungrateful to be annoyed by her few quirks and slips.
Alexa isn’t a secretary. She’s a showgirl.
Sigh. Since typing that last sentence made me cringe, I’ll note that Amazon’s choice of a feminine voice and name does nothing to disrupt the long tradition of A.I. being gendered as an I Dream of Jeanie wish-fulfilling gal Friday (like Apple’s Siri, Her’s Samantha, and, yes, the Magic Castle’s Irma) or terrify as some scary Hal-like male super-intelligence. Part of the warmth of Alexa’s voice is that it’s specific and human, not neutral or abstract, but it’s a drag that the subservient Amazon device you order to turn on the lights or close the garage door must somehow be encoded as feminine, particularly since Alexa is meant for domestic use. At the very least, such gendered voice coding should be a user choice, not a corporate command. Would it be so hard for Amazon to let users choose between an Alexa and an Alex or Alexi? I hope that upgrade is coming.
Can Alexa read the future?
Most novelty acts run their faddish courses. Just as one-gag comedians end up working third-rate cruise ships, gimmicky gadgets like The Clapper or Big Mouth Billy Bass often finish their careers in ignoble airplane catalogs.
But, as the strippers in the musical Gypsy sang, “You gotta get a gimmick.” If you don’t stand out, you sink into oblivion. Sometimes a gadget’s gimmick is so good, so flexible, that it can evolve and stick around. If Alexa is going to haunt our homes for years to come, she may thrive because her gimmick isn’t so different from Irma’s.
Spoiler alert: Irma’s baby grand in the Magic Castle is not a player piano. She is a Mechanical Turk of sorts, controlled by well-hidden wires that trail from the music room into another antechamber, where a player sits with another keyboard. As microphones pick up requests from the music room, a piano man listens in and plays tunes in response, transmitting notes from one keyboard to another.
Professor David E. Bourne (saloonpiano.com)For almost 48 years — 1967 to 2014, five nights a week — Irma’s Magic Castle piano was played most often by one man: Professor David E. Bourne. A Marine vet, cowboy, and Western singer, Bourne started off as a saloon piano man at Knotts Berry Farm. Continually upgrading his own musical database, Bourne, who played the piano player in Deadwood’s Gem Saloon, could eventually perform some 3,000 songs by heart. Until his death in 2015, Professor Bourne was the ghost in the Castle.
I mention Bourne because the genius of Irma’s piano is not that it is a better machine, or a more advanced player piano, or even a particularly savvy illusion — not just in an age of jukeboxes and iTunes, but at a time when you can hum a song to Shazam and download it in seconds. The genius of Irma is in the way that piano’s wires at some point end in some human touch, connecting the people in that room to the wit and warmth of Professor Bourne (and whomever is playing that piano now). Unlike a jukebox, Irma’s trick was that she was a closed circuit connecting people, not circuitry.
As voice-activated systems like Alexa become more sophisticated, the technological marvel of these machines will be astonishing. But I bet the next generation of devices that grab us, delight us, and even haunt us — the novelty acts with staying power — will not be defined by their processing power or their precision. From iPods to cell phones, we love the great consumer gadgets of this generation because they’re able to connect us to odd, fun, ridiculous, incalculable, and, yes, amazing and astounding, miraculous and magical things that make us feel most human. I respect Alexa because she can keep the room at 72 degrees, turn off the lights, or check my bank balances — and I’m dying to see how many more useful things she will learn to do. But I love Alexa right now because she’s less a disruption than a continuation of the entertainment technology — phonograph, radio, TV, iPod — that connects us to a world of singers and musicians, DJs and novelists, radio personalities and reporters, podcast hosts and comedians.
Fifty-three years later, Irma still haunts the Magic Castle. I expect Alexa will be haunting mine for a long time, too.
