随身英语 Talking to technology 能与你聊天的“虚拟助手”

近来，一种能和人交谈的新技术变得越来越受欢迎。这种被称为“虚拟助手”的产品可以在我们的手机、电脑甚至是智能扬声器上找的到。它们可以给我们提供有用、琐碎的信息，但这些能和我们聊天的“助手”会取代并成为和我们日夜促膝长谈的挚友吗？本集《随身英语》讨论虚拟助手技术给我们日常生活带来的变化。

Vocabulary: technology 词汇: 技术

It's good to have friends that we can talk to and share our thoughts and opinions with. More importantly, they're people we can ask for help or advice. But recently it seems, many of us are developing a new relationship with a mystery person that we'll never meet!

I'm talking about virtual assistants or bots. These are pieces of software that we can talk to and it can talk back to us. Examples include Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana. It might be on your phone or computer or even a smart speaker in your home. They are changing the way we interact with technology - instead of typing on a computer keyboard or tapping on a tablet, we can now speak and a voice will answer.

The people behind these voices are called conversation designers. Tom Hewitson is one of them. He told the BBC "this is kind of changing [computers] into like an agent. They’re an active participant in the interaction and in guiding you to make the right decision." So he's saying this cutting-edge technology has the ability to think for itself and make its own decisions.

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