Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
THE SECRET GENIUS
Alexa, how exactly do you work? Professor Hannah Fry delves into the inner workings of virtual assistants such as Amazon’s, which are now in almost half of all UK homes.
At the multinational firm’s London HQ, she is shown the original sketch of an Alexa that founder Jeff Bezos scribbled on a white board.
Then she takes a screwdriver to the device to work out what’s going on inside. Hannah reveals how noisy Second World War German U-boats inspired the high-tech microphones that allow the likes of Alexa to hear our commands.
We also discover modern wi-fi’s debt to a 1950s Hollywood star who pioneered the technology that allows virtual assistants to connect to the internet.
There’s also a tale of how the defeat of chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov by supercomputer Deep Blue shaped Alexa’s brain.
Hannah also asks the big question that we all want to know the answer to: Is Alexa always listening? She is certainly trying to…