“Alexa?”
If you own an Amazon Echo, there’s a chance that just reading that word triggered a pavlovian “bimm” in your mind. Or, if you have the wake sound disabled, maybe it’s the timer alarm that makes you twitch if you hear it on a TV show (or someone else’s speaker). Whatever you think of the sounds a smart speaker makes, none of them are accidental. They have all been meticulously designed to pull your attention or provide reassurance, depending on their goal. And the Echo could have sounded very different from how we know it today.
The Echo series, in particular, has been instrumental in defining the smart speaker and the sounds we expect and (to avoid burned pizza) need it to make. Maybe you don’t think about these transient acoustic signposts much – the beeps and boops that bookend Alexa’s verbal responses – and that’s okay, that’s by design too. In…
