Voice assistants, however, are unusually polarising. Technology frequently inspires ambivalence: we know that Facebook and Google know too much about us, yet we continue to use their services because they’re so damn convenient. In a statement, Amazon said that the Echo must have misheard the wake word, misheard a request to send a message, misheard a name in its contacts list and then misheard a confirmation to send the message, all during a conversation about hardwood floors. In San Francisco, Shawn Kinnear claimed that his Echo activated itself and said cheerfully: “Every time I close my eyes, all I see is people dying.” In Portland, Oregon, a woman discovered that her Echo had taken it upon itself to send recordings of private conversations to one of her husband’s employees. (Amazon attributed this “unfortunate mishap” to human error.) Last year, an Amazon customer in Germany was mistakenly sent about 1,700 audio files from someone else’s Echo, providing enough information to name and locate the unfortunate user and his girlfriend. Then again, voice assistants often do things that they are not supposed to do. The Dot wasn’t supposed to behave like a dadaist drill sergeant. “Having worked at Amazon, and having seen how they used people’s data, I knew I couldn’t trust them.” When the Dot’s outburst subsided, he unplugged it and deposited it in the bin. He bought a Dot, the Echo’s cheaper, smaller model, after it launched in 2016, and found it useful enough until the day it went haywire. Only when Amazon released the Echo in the US in 2014 did he realise what he had been working on. Three years earlier, he had volunteered to sit in a room reciting a string of apparently meaningless phrases into a microphone for an undisclosed purpose. This was especially interesting because Josephson (not his real name) was a former Amazon employee. Josephson had not said the wake word – “Alexa” – to activate it and nothing he said would stop it. It appeared to be regurgitating requests to book train tickets for journeys he had already taken and to record TV shows that he had already watched. When Martin Josephson, who lives in London, came home from work, he heard his Amazon Echo Dot voice assistant spitting out fragmentary commands, seemingly based on his previous interactions with the device. IMDB has him created as the voice of the Evil Computer and Various Robot Butlers, but his family cannot find verifiable truth that this is true.One day in 2017, Alexa went rogue. And that the voice in Woody Allen's movie as another actor doing an 'attempted imitation of HAL's voice'. Rain's family disagree that he actually did the voice, saying that there is no proof of this. Many believe that Rain lent his voice for was Woody Allen's sci-fi spoof Sleeper, in which, he supposedly voices an evil computer. Rain would go on to reprise the role years later in the sequel, 2010. Despite never actually appearing on screen, Rain manages to steal the show and deliver a performance for the ages. Stanley Kubrick cast Douglas Rain as the voice of the iconic HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey after production had already been completed. However prolific his stage career was, Rain will always be remembered for his work in one of the most celebrated sci-fi movies in history. The Stratford Festival was easily what Douglas Rain participated in the most consistently during his long career, participating in a total of 23 seasons, doing his final production in 1998, starring in A Man for All Seasons. In that inaugural year, Rain played Marquis of Dorset and Tyrrell in William Shakespeare's Richard III alongside future Star Wars star Alec Guinness, who played the title role. It was in 1958 that Rain returned to Canada and became one of the founding members of the Stratford Festival, which is currently North America's largest classical theatre company. Following his college days at the University of Manitoba, Rain traveled to London and studied acting at the Old Vic Theatre. Born in Winnipeg, Canada in 1928, Douglas Rain got his start early as a child doing some voice work on the radio.
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