Writing this week’s blog post has been difficult, because I have experienced significant trauma related to the topic of this post. In graduate school, I wrote an essay on the differences between written and spoken languages in a course called “diachronic linguistics”, in which I came to the conclusion that it is impossible to study the development of spoken languages over time. The professor who oversaw my work failed to understand my point, and I refused to budge. I got such a poor grade in that one course that for that reason I was not able to earn a master’s degree in linguistics. I decided that didn’t matter, because no one would ever hire me for a linguistics degree, and I still earned my master’s degree in information science anyways (though few people seem to be very impressed with that degree, too).
I do not wish to go into great detail about the differences between written and spoken languages here. Instead, I want to point out something that has changed in the intervening decades. Back when I wrote my essay, I already pointed out that sound recordings are actually a form of written language. Yet in the intervening years, the fidelity and data storage capacities of recording systems have increased vastly. Gone are the days of grainy recordings! Today, humans are probably unable to distinguish between sound recordings and actual spoken languages.
And there’s even more! Today it either is feasible or it is rapidly becoming feasible for data processing companies (such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon or probably a dozen more so-called “tech giants”) to track what their users like … and so they can not only make any voice sound real, they can make it sound very much like a beloved voice. Perhaps this need not even simply be the voice of a beloved person. They can probably monitor which voices, which intonations and similar speech patterns users find the most agreeable. They can thereby create entire new personas which are better than the mere flesh and blood persons we experience “in real life”.
Written language has come a long way, baby — and it also shows no sign of slowing down any time soon.
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