The Smart Speaker Heard Everything. It Never Once Said 'I'm Sorry'

The speaker in our kitchen heard the fight, the silence, and the apology. It reported the first two to its makers. The apology, apparently, was not actionable.

I know this because of the ads. The day after the fight, my phone showed me ads for couples therapy, for divorce lawyers, for a book called “When the Words Run Out.” I had not searched for any of these. I had not told anyone about the fight. But the kitchen had heard it, and the kitchen talks.

We bought the speaker for the music and the timers. We knew, in the way you know things you do not want to know, that it was listening. We told ourselves it listened for the wake word. It listened for the word, and then it listened to everything after the word, and then it listened to the silences between the words, because the silences are the most interesting part.

The fight was about money. It was loud, then quiet, then loud again, the way fights are. The speaker sat on the counter through all of it, its little light pulsing, keeping the beat. At some point I looked at it and thought: you are the only one who heard the whole thing. My wife was crying. The speaker was collecting.

The apology came the next morning, in the kitchen, with the speaker still there. “I'm sorry,” I said. My wife said she was sorry too. We stood there in the light of the refrigerator, making it work, the way people do. It was the most human thing that happened in that room all year, and the speaker heard it, and the speaker's makers did not care, because an apology is not actionable data.

We unplugged the speaker yesterday. The kitchen feels smaller, and quieter, and mine. My phone still shows me the ads, because the data does not go away when you unplug the thing that collected it. Somewhere, a profile of our worst night sits in a database, tagged, categorized, monetized. I have started talking to the toaster, just to confuse it. The toaster does not listen. The toaster has never once said it was sorry, and for once, that is exactly what I want.