Siri and the skills of encoding personal meanings in the context of English speech etiquette

Abstract

The subject of the study is the content of personal meanings of greeting questions in the context of English communication formulas of Siri. The object of the study is the ability of the voice assistant to simulate spontaneous dialogue with a person and the adaptation of artificial intelligence to natural speech. The purpose of the study is to identify the features and level of Siri's language skills in the process of communicating with users in English. Such aspects of the topic as the problem of understanding that exists in two types of communication are considered in detail: 1) between a person and a person; 2) between a machine and a person; the use of stable communication formulas by artificial intelligence as responses to the question «How are you?»; determining the level and speech-making potential in the responses of the voice assistant. The following methods were used in the research: descriptive, comparative, contextual, comparative method and linguistic experiment. The scientific novelty is that the problems related to encoding the personal meanings of the Siri voice assistant have never been studied in detail in philology and linguistics. Due to the prevalence use of voice systems in various spheres of social and public life, there is a need to analyze errors in speech and describe communication failures in dialogues between voice assistants and users. The main conclusions of the study are: 1) the machine is not able to generate answers based on the experience of past impressions; 2) deviations from the norms of English speech etiquette in Siri's responses are insignificant, but often lead to communicative failures; 3) the one-sided encoding of personal meaning was found in the responses: from the machine to the person, but not vice versa.