Me, Myself, and Aliciente
The first thing you need to know is that Siri thinks my name is Aliciente.
Siri pronounces it “Alishent,” although my friend Andrea points out that it should probably be “Ali-see-yente,” Spanish-style. It’s just more evidence of how committed Siri is to antagonizing me, by not even pronouncing my fake name right.
My daughters trained my iPhone to call me Aliciente when I first got an iPhone back in the day. No, it doesn’t mean anything, but I thought it was funny, and now it’s become one of those things that Mom holds on to far longer than the kids do, like calling poufy dresses “pooey-rolls” or saying “bucksketti” instead of spaghetti. Also because MY Siri has an Australian male accent, and ever since Mark Lee in Gallipoli, I have a soft spot for Australian male accents regardless of what they’re saying.
Also, I don’t know how to change it. That’s a factor.
But it hasn’t been that big of a deal because it’s not like my iPhone addressed me directly very often. In fact, it only ever came up if I texted my contact card to someone, and the someone would invariably respond, “Who’s Aliciente?”
But ever since I was gifted an Apple Watch for Mother’s Day last month, Siri is really trying it with me, or I should say, with Aliciente. Because now Siri is attached to my body and believes that he knows better than I do how to maintain his host organism.
For those who don’t know, the Apple Watch has a built-in motion detector and heart rate monitor. As part of the setup, you tell it how much you’d like to move/stand/exercise during the day. And then, with a relentlessness that bounty hunters and toddlers begging for more screen time would admire, Siri keeps track and sends you messages from the end of your own arm, three feet away.
Like this.
Yes, Siri, I was aware that was a particularly sedentary day. Also I was aware that day that I was on two deadlines, behind on a book proposal, and working what is basically a full-time consulting job while ALSO reconciling the guest list for my mother in law’s 85th birthday party. Something had to give that day and, evidently, it was my cardio level and your esteem.
And this.
Sent at 10:30 pm. Right. Twenty-three minutes around my Oakland neighborhood in the dark seems prudent.
The last straw was on Monday night while I was 27,000 feet above Illinois, circling in a United 757 and praying the weather would lift over Chicago and we’d be able to land in time to make our connection to California. Alas, it was not to be: we landed in Grand Rapids to wait out the storm and “violent turbulence” per the captain, thus stretching what should have been a 90-minute flight into five hours of travel, with another five to go.
Siri didn’t care. Siri spent five hours telling me to get it in gear, by, I guess, doing laps up and down the aisle. Believe me, Siri, no one understood better than me Monday night how much better off I would have been were I moving. I don’t control the seat belt sign, OK?
As someone who writes about speech technology and digital assistants and privacy issues, I’m professionally leery of giving devices too much information and power over me. We don’t have an Alexa or a Google Home, and I routinely review my privacy settings in social media and regularly opt-out of creepy online address databases like Spokeo and Spyfly. (In all seriousness, you should set a reminder and do it quarterly. Search for your name plus “ADDRESS” in Google and wherever your personal data comes up in the search results, follow their usually intentionally convoluted rules for opting out. Do it for your kids and parents, too.)
Yet I’ve welcomed this draconian Australian personal fitness instructor who can’t even be bothered to learn my name onto my left wrist, and spend the daylight hours trying to appease him. I can’t explain it either, except to show you this message from yesterday:
That’ll do, Mark Lee. That’ll do.
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