The document presents research by the Hypervoice Consortium, exploring the future of voice communication as it evolves in tandem with technological advancements by 2024. The authors highlight the integral role of voice in human interaction and discuss the potential for major shifts in how voice is utilized, driven by a sensor and sense-making revolution. Key themes include optimism about progress, the need for simplicity in user experiences, and the ethical challenges surrounding privacy and data use in voice communications.

1. Kelly Fitzsimmons, Martin Geddes, Lindsay Seabrook
May 2016
The Guardian
Avatar

2. Thanks to our sponsors

3. • This presentation summarises the research
undertaken by the Hypervoice Consortium in
2014.
• Our goal was to explore the future of voice as
computers join us in conversation
• We had the luxury to go away for six months,
and both look at what is real and grounded, as
well as to think big thoughts.
• We adopted an approach of thinking by first
principles, not by analogies.

4. “Dream dreams
and write them
aye, but
live them first.”
—Samuel Eliot Morison
Historian and Sailor

5. • Our thinking was grounded in our past
experience and expertise:
– Kelly Fitzsimmons is an information security
expert. Her company, HarQen, had created the
world’s first ‘hypervoice’ conference calling service
(shown on the next slide).
– Martin Geddes is a computer scientist and
network performance expert, with a decade of
research into voice and messaging.
– Lindsay Seabrook is a marketing consultant,
empath and (unlike the two Gen Xers above) a
‘millennial’.

7. We started
with a
simple question

8. In the year
2024
how will people
communicate?

10. Perfected conference call?

11. • Our ingoing hypothesis was that the future of
voice would involve some kind of ‘super-
improved’ conference call.
• We had a list of ten ways in which the
experience might change.
• You can view the presentation we used to
start the conversation with interviewees here.

12. Interviews with experts
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13. Who?
Founders
CEOs, CTOs, Chairman
Managing Directors, Director
EVP & SVPs
Head of Innovation
Analysts
Chief Strategist
Mobile Design/ UI Expert
Head of Digital Inclusion
Product Managers
Professor of Virtual Reality
Professor of Speech Processing
AI Experts
Infosec experts
Unify
BT
Google
Plantronics
SIP Forum
GSMA
KnowledgeVision
VoiceSage
Expect Labs
Venture Capital firms
University College London
Univ. of South Alabama Center for
Forensics, IT and Security
University of Edinburgh

14. Industry survey
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16. Videos (lots)

17. We explored the ecosystem…
150+
companies and
products

18. “In exploration,
there needs to be the
set of people who have
no rules, and they are
going into the frontier.”
—David E. Kaplan
Physicist, “Particle Fever”

19. We allowed the
journey
to take us to
unexpected places…

20. What we found
was jarring…

21. WHY? IT CHALLENGED OUR CORE
BELIEFS AND ASSUMPTIONS

22. “Lord, we know
what we are, but
know not what
we may be.”
—William Shakespeare
Hamlet

23. Optimism

24. • We took a fundamentally optimistic view of
the future.
• The quality and quantity of human life on
Earth has been rising substantially.
• We see no reason why progress should
suddenly reverse in the near future, barring
some cataclysmic event.

25. Core
human
need

26. • Voice communication is integral to being
human, and as such it will always be part of
our ‘conversational DNA’.
• The idea that ‘voice is dead’ is tied to the
decline of telephony, which is merely one
format in which voice communication is
packaged.

28. • There is a good case to be made that the
speed of change is indeed increasing.
• As such, we are likely to see more change in
the next ten years than we have seen in
several decades.
• That means we need to take a quite radical
stance in what is possible.

29. Information revolutions
Communications
1. Computation
2. Sense


31. Information revolutions
Communications
Computation
1. Sense


32. We are all cyborgs
Cyborgs

33. Information revolutions
Communications
Computation
Sense

34. “Information is
cheap,
meaning is
expensive.”
—George Dyson,
Physicist

35. Sensors +
Sense-making +
Sentience
Symbols +
Structure +
Search
Senseless to SENSED

36. Voice belongs to the
sensor revolution
Sensors
Voice
Messaging
SYMBOLICSENSED

37. Hypervoice, or…?
Hypersense

38. • We quickly realised that voice could not be
seen in isolation from a wider context of a
sensor and sense-making revolution.
• Voice is intimate bio-sensed data. It is a
product of our bodies. This means it belongs
with other sensed data like heart rate, skin
conductivity, or joint motion.

39. Timeline…
Web 1.0
Hypertext
Web 2.0
Hypermessaging
Web 3.0
Hypersense
Hyperlinks Link Sharing Activity streams

40. • The future of voice is tied to fundamental
advances in how we contextualise
information.
• The 1990s saw the hypertext Web emerge.
• The 2000s added in timelines and gave
messages URLs. Social media is really
‘hypermessaging’.
• The 2010s are about adding sensed data
types; ‘hypersense’ relates information to its
physical context using activity streams.

41. “…the future
already
has begun…”
— Alvin Toffler,
Futurist

42. Our 2024 vision was
already happening…

43. “The world is moving so
fast these days that the
man who says it
can't be done is
generally interrupted by
someone doing it.”
— Elbert Hubbard,
Writer & Philosopher

44. Our ideas were already
features of OS releases!

45. End-of-history
illusion

46. • Our vision was myopic: the ‘end-of-history
illusion’ had tricked us into a linear
extrapolation of the past in a super-linear
world.
• We needed to get far more radical!

47. Wild speculation?

48. Science fiction?

49. TCMS
Already shipping product!

50. To see further we had to
look to edge cultures
HACKER
DISABLED
GENER-
ATIONS
GAMER
“Mainstream”
(10 years away)

51. To see further we had to
look to edge cultures
HACKER
DISABLED
GENER-
ATIONS
GAMER
“Mainstream”
(10 years away)

52. Gaming annexes the world
“There is a
mass exodus
to virtual worlds.”
—Edward Castronova

53. 500 million
gamers

54. 3 billion
hours per week

55. 10,000
hours by age of 21

56. “Epic wins”

57. “There is
no unemployment
in the
World of Warcraft.”
—Jane McGonigal
Game designer and author

58. The Gaming Paradox
From the inside
it’s meaningful
From the outside
it’s meaningless

59. “Blissful productivity”

60. • Jane McGonigal describes the feeling state
that drives people to play games.
• There is a reward of ‘epic wins’, but between
those you experience highly meaningful
teamwork.
• This work that is so intrinsically rewarding that
you want to do as much of it as possible.
There’s no email or calendaring or traditional
meetings.
• People are even willing to pay to do this work!

61. Today’s work: “Going postal”

62. Look to edge cultures
HACKER
DISABLED
GENER-
ATIONS
GAMER
“Mainstream”
(10 years away)

63. Glomads

64. Gamification

65. BYOD = Revolt against the CIO

67. • The old and the young have an intolerance of
complexity, and require extreme simplicity of
UI/UX.
• They are motivated by the outcome, not the
interaction with the mechanism. There has to
be a clear answer to “why should I engage
with this?”.
• Adding clutter and complexity drives these
demographics away from technology. It’s all
about what we can safely (and possibly
magically) remove from the experience.

68. Look to edge cultures
HACKER
DISABLED
GENER-
ATIONS
GAMER
“Mainstream”
(10 years away)

69. Privacy is
dead?

70. • There is a widespread mem of ‘privacy is
dead’.
• Strangely enough, a lot of those spreading this
meme have a strong commercial interest in
your lack of privacy, in order to harvest your
identity and resell it to advertisers.

71. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)#mediaviewer/File:Anonymous_at_Scientology_in_Los_Angeles.jpg

74. • The zeitgeist is very much concerned with
surveillance and privacy. Many people and
technologists are working to restore and
enhance our online privacy.

75. Bring your own device leads to…

76. BYOID today

77. Right to be
forgotten

78. Even Google’s
founders might
regret weak
privacy…

79. Look to edge cultures
HACKER
DISABLED
GENER-
ATIONS
GAMER
“Mainstream”
(10 years away)

80. “People with disabilities
are the world's largest
minority, an emerging market
on par with the size of China!”
Source: Denis Boudreau
1 billion
people

81. “There are 650m people
classified as hearing impaired
in the world.
2%have treatment for
their hearing loss.”
Source: heartoday.org

82. We are all disabled some of the time:
Driving a car = paraplegic

83. Disabled people invent
solutions to real
communications problems…

84. WHAT’S GOING ON?
SENSORS AND SENSING:
A SENSUAL AND SENSORY
REVOLUTION

85. Sensual
interfaces

86. “Soundscaping” (and “Sensescaping”)
Soundscaping

87. Wearables
10x growth of device base?

88. Wearables
Immersive

89. Social
Robotics

90. IoT
• Nest
“Social” sensing devices

91. global connected car
penetration by 2020
Source: Telefónica

92. $100 million
investment in
perceptual
computing

93. WHAT’S GOING ON?
SENSE-MAKING

94. “Machine learning is
the most significant
technology trend.
Computers have to get
smarter and anticipate.”
—Kevin Turner
Microsoft COO

95. Anticipatory Computing

96. Virtual Assistants

97. PROBLEM:
We are the
sense-making
machine

98. • When on a team retreat to process our
research, we heard a ‘beep’ in the house.
Then a short while later, another… and
another.
• Where could it be from? We hunted and
waited and hunted. Eventually we found it
was a refridgerator door left very slightly ajar.
• This was an ‘aha!’ moment: the sensors were
applying a new sense-making load onto us.

99. WHAT’S WRONG?

101. “Nearly all men can
stand adversity,
but if you want to
test a man's character,
give him power.”
—Abraham Lincoln

103. “Too many wrongly
characterize the debate as
‘security versus privacy.’
The real choice is
liberty versus control.”
— Bruce Schneier
Security expert

104. The ethical hole
The biggest
problem
with voice
(and all sensor data)
is privacy

105. • Companies harvest a crop that is our identity;
the benefit to us is small in comparison.
• Voice exposes the disconnect between cost
and benefit; the discomfort people have with
voice recording is a wake-up call that we are
giving too much away.

106. “Surveillance isn’t simply
the all-being all-looking eye.
It’s a mechanism by which
systems of power
assert their power.”
—danah boyd
Scholar at Microsoft Research

107. It’s all about…
POWER

108. The crisis…? Power imbalance

109. Social & technical etiquette
“Can we
record this
meeting?”

110. • The very process of doing interviews using a
hypervoice application alerted us to the
problem.
• We would ask interviewees if we could record
the call for note-taking purposes only.
• Our ‘contract’ with them was not, however,
being recorded. And there was no
enforcement mechanism.
• This was an asymmetrical relationship; we had
their voice, they could not control it.

111. Is this the only choice?
No privacy Decision
fatigue

112. • As we move to more sophisticated processing
of voice, the ‘refrigerator beep’ problem will
just grow and grow.
• “Can we record your call, run it through my
relational coach, transcribe it for our
enterprise archive, store it in Iceland, use this
data retention policy, test you for possible
mental health issues…”
• This doesn’t scale as a user experience, or
ethically.

113. “In this possibly terminal phase
of human existence,
democracy and freedom are
more than just ideals
to be valued – they may be
essential to survival.”
—Noam Chomsky
"Manufacturing Consent"

114. THE ABYSS

115. “The single biggest
problem in
communication is
the illusion
that it has taken place.”
—George Bernard Shaw
Playwright

116. Information
obesity

118. Data spills:
Expensive clean-up costs

119. Web
serfdom

120. • We are experiencing web serfdom. We are the
tenant farmer on the Internet. Our identity is being
tilled and sold for profit, without us reaping the
benefits.
• We relinquish all rights when we are in a corporate
context, and nearly all right just by using
applications. It’s in or opt out.
• There is no ability to negotiates terms of use,
manage the outcome, audit the process or hold
parties accountable.

121. THE IDEAL

122. “Doubt and mistrust
are the mere panic of
timid imagination, which the
steadfast heart will conquer,
and the large mind transcend.”
—Helen Keller

123. What technologies can
get me to this end state?

124. How do we
rebalance power
to get to “blissful productivity”
(sentient machines
working for us)
and avoid the abyss
(us working
for sentient machines)
?

125. THE BEGINNINGS OF AN AHA!

126. Something
Missing…

127. • We must offload sense-making and decision-
making to smart dynamic systems that act in
our interest.
• How can this be done? We need to become
aware of the framing of the issues that we are
attracted to as technologists.

128. Logic
Dominant technology
paradigm
Feelings
Subservient technology
paradigm

129. “Voice is
really about
emotional
connection.”
—Daniel Berninger,
Telecoms Analyst

130. Today: masculine paradigm

131. • The mainframe, minicomputer, PC and
smartphone all follow a ‘yang’ paradigm.
• There is a closed and known universe with
explicit rules that we ‘program’.
• The ‘command line’ is perhaps the most
obvious exemplar of the masculine paradigm.

132. Domination vs Partnership

133. Ecological
perspective

134. Adaptogens
Image: Wikipedia

135. Biomimicry
Image: Wikipedia

136. Permaculture
Image: Wikipedia

137. spirit of america / Shutterstock.com

138. • The current ecology of data is living in an
isolated biodome.
• Sensors puncture the biodome. Our view of
‘digital ecology’ needs to adjust accordingly.

139. DIFFERENT APPROACH?

140. Artificial Intelligence?Make machines more like us?

141. Make us more like machines?

142. Artificial
Intelligence?
Identity
Augmentation?

143. • Self-augmentation is archetypally female:
make-up, hairdos, ear piercings, neck
adornments, carrying loads on heads with
cloths, breast enhancement.
• Is there a fundamentally different paradigm
approach? Is “artificial intelligence” even the
right framing for the sensor world where we
all have bodies?

144. The ethical dream
The biggest
problem
with voice is
privacy

145. We have virtualised machines…
• Compute
• Transmission
• Storage
Computation Storage Transmission

146. We have not (yet) virtualised…
US

147. Why?
HACKER
DISABLED
GENER-
ATIONS
GAMER
Blissful
productivity

148. What?
HACKER
DISABLED
GENER-
ATIONS
GAMER
Virtualised
identity

149. How?
HACKER
DISABLED
GENER-
ATIONS
GAMER
GUARDIAN
AVATAR

150. THE
GUARDIAN
AVATAR

151. Digital doppelgänger

152. Your better self

153. • We are intolerant of machines joining us in
conversation for a good reason.
• To get blissfully productive, we need to get
superhuman.
• We need new savant qualities.
• The Guardian Avatar embodies this; a virtual
‘you’ that has the aspiration of accentuating
the best of you and your life.

154. The “Guardian Avatar” is…
1. An ethical stance

155. Self-sovereign identity

156. The “Guardian Avatar” is…
1. An ethical stance
2. A thinking tool
3. Practical technology

157. “Fourth wall”

158. The “Guardian Avatar” is…
1. An ethical stance
2. A thinking tool
3. Practical technology

159. Browser for a
hypersense “metaverse”

160. “The best time to
plant a tree
was 20 years ago.
The second best time
is now.”
— Chinese Proverb

161. Automated TOS lawyer

162. Why?

163. 2 million factor authentication:
continual sensor data montitoring

164. Data
destruction

165. How does it work?
• Existing technologies
– Personal data locker
– Federated ID
– Distributed identity & trust
systems
– Distributed storage systems
– Biometrics
– Inference engines
– Privacy filters
– Assistants
– ASR
– Machine translation
– Sentiment analysis
• New & emerging
technologies
– VRM
– Gesture recognition
– Activity recognition
– Automatic content linking
– Homomorphic encryption
– Artificial sentience
– Inclusive & adaptive design
– Avatar animation
– Engagement analysis
– Voice reconstruction

166. Ultimate selfie

167. Dynamic vs static identity
“We change every second
that our heart beats.
Our identity systems
do not reflect this.”
– E.K. Fitzsimmons

168. Why Believe?

169. Why does it make sense?
• Computers are far better at
completing tasks where the rules are
explicit and the data set is extremely
large.
• Logical systems are indefatigable and
will perform explicit tasks more
reliably.

170. Why should you care?
• It will protect our sanity, optimize
our work flow to fit our mood,
expand our time available for highly
rewarding work and allow us to
achieve blissful productivity.

171. Why is it important?
• It a moral imperative that we own
our own identity.
–Self-soverignty should be an
inalienable right.
• Governments have proven poor at
protecting the privacy and managing
identity.

172. “Greater technology will
selfishly unleash our
talents, but it will also
unselfishly unleash others:
our children, and all
children to come.”
— Kevin Kelly,
Founder of Wired

173. www.hypervoice.org
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