Engineering the Telephone Interface
We wanted to be able to provide a way for people to interact with our Simulated Selves, but this is quite a tricky thing to be able to do. We need to be able to identify when someone is asking a question and not just talking about something as they walk by. Using a telephone provide a mechanism where by a deliberate action is required to ask a telephone, and also a mechanism for being able to reliably capture a voice in a busy environment, and then convert it to text.
The telephone hand set is now almost an anachronism, it was one of the most prominent communication devices for most of the 20th century and played an important role in our social lives (watch any film set before about 2005 and the telephone usually plays some role). Now it has all but disappeared from our homes and offices, many young people have never used a telephone. We wanted to make a connection between older technologies and the emerging technology of generative AI. The telephone is a device that older members of our society understand and know how to use, and an ‘old timey’ novelty for the young. Its a bridge between the 20th and 21st century, between young and old.
Old telephones are cool. They are very solid objects made to last for a long time and they have. We are using a telephone made in 1962 made from an early plastic called Bakelite - its tough stuff.
Electronics crammed into the old telephone
So how do you interface a 1962 telephone with modern computers? Well by replacing the internals of the phone with modern technology. In this case we took out the old rotary dialer and replaced it with a round display which is driven by the hackers friend, a raspberry pi single board computer. The speaker and microphone in the handset have had new connectors soldered on and a USB analogue to digital audio interface added.
We kept the original 1962 speaker and microphone because we wanted it to sound like an old telephone, but one unexpected consequence of this we found out in testing that these old microphones don’t pick up higher pitched voices as well as lower ones. So male voices are recognised more easily than female and children - a bias of the times it was made. Unfortunately this as discovered too late to replace the microphone.
Another anachronistic feature of the telephone is that when lift the receiver you will hear a strange noise, which is very familiar to anybody who used the internet between it first being available in the early 1990’s and the early 2000’s when the first broadband internet became available. Its the modem dial up sound, in which a modulator/demodulator would convert data into audio tones, this sound is the users modem negotiating a connection with the internet service provider. Its a reminder that our ubiquitous, always available internet connections are a relatively recent thing.
This telephone is haunted, it is inhabited by the digital offspring of Bill and Svenja, who answers the phone. The figure is another Metahuman, made by averaging the two heads of Bill and Svenja, as is the cloned voice of this figure. It is the personal assistance of Bill and Svenja who mediates how and questions from the audience interrupt Bill and Svenja’s conversations.
The assembled telephone.