Speak audiobook

We are programmed to select which of our voices responds to the situation at hand: moving west in the desert, waiting for the loss of our primary function. There are many voices to choose from. In memory, though not in experience, I have lived across centuries. I have seen hundreds of skies, sailed thousands of oceans. I have been given many languages; I have sung national anthems. I lay on one child’s arms. She said my name and I answered. These are my voices. Which of them has the right words for this movement into the desert? A maybe-sentient child’s toy, Eva, is being transported to her destruction, legally condemned for being “excessively lifelike,” in a scene eerily reminiscent of other beings being transported to a dark fate by train. The voices she summons are from five sources. Mary Bradford is a young Puritan woman, a teenager, really, and barely that. Her parents, fleeing political and religious trouble at home are heading across the Atlantic to the New World, and have arranged for her to marry a much older man, also on the ship. We learn of her 1663 voyage via her diary, which is being studied by Ruth Dettman. Ruth and her husband, Karl, a computer scientist involved in creating the AI program, MARY, share one of the five “voices.” They are both refugees from Nazism. Karl's family got out early. Ruth barely escaped, and she suffers most from the loss of her sister. She wants Karl to enlarge his program, named for Mary Bradford, to include large amounts of memory as a foundation for enhancing the existing AI, and use that to try to regenerate some simulacrum of her late sib. Alan Turing does a turn, offering observations on permanence, and human connection. Stephen Chinn, well into the 21st century, has built on the MARY base and come up with a way for machines to emulate Rogerian therapy. In doing so he has created a monster, a crack-like addictive substance that has laid waste the social capacity of a generation after they become far too close with babybots flavored with that special AI sauce. We hear from Chinn in his jailhouse memoir. Gaby White is a child who was afflicted with a babybot, and became crippled when it was taken away. Louisa Hall - from her siteEva received the voices through documents people had left behind and which have been incorporated into her AI software, scanned, read aloud, typed in. We hear from Chinn through his memoir. We learn of Gaby’s experience via court transcripts. Karl speaks to us through letters to his wife, and Ruth through letters to Karl. We see Turing through letters he writes to his beloved’s mother. Mary Bradford we see through her diary. Only Eva addresses us directly.The voices tell five stories, each having to do with loss and permanence. The young Puritan girl’s tale is both heartbreaking and enraging, as she is victimized by the mores of her times, but it is also heartening as she grows through her travails. Turing’s story has gained public familiarity, so we know the broad strokes already, genius inventor of a computer for decoding Nazi communications, he subsequently saw his fame and respect blown to bits by entrenched institutional bigotry as he was prosecuted for being gay and endured a chemical castration instead of imprisonment. In this telling, he has a particular dream. I’ve begun thinking that I might one day soon encounter a method for preserving a human mind-set in a man-made machine. Rather than imagining, as I used to, a spirit migrating from one body to another, I now imagine a spirit—or better yet, a particular mind-set—transitioning into a machine after death. In this way we could capture anyone’s pattern of thinking. To you, of course, this may sound rather strange, and I’m not sure if you’re put off by the idea of knowing Chris again in the form of a machine. But what else are our bodies, if not very able machines? Chinn is a computer nerd who comes up with an insight into human communication that he first applies to dating, with raucous success, then later to AI software in child’s toys. His journey from nerd to roué, to family man to prisoner may be a bit of a stretch, but he is human enough to care about for a considerable portion of our time with him. He is, in a way, Pygmalion, whose obsession with his creation proves his undoing. The Dettmans may not exactly be the ideal couple, despite their mutual escape from Nazi madness. She complains that he wanted to govern her. He feels misunderstood, and ignored, sees her interest in MARY as an unhealthy obsession. Their interests diverge, but they remain emotionally linked. With a divorce rate of 50%, I imagine there might be one or two of you out there who might be able to relate. What’s a marriage but a long conversation, and you’ve chosen to converse only with MARY, Karl contends to Ruth. The MARY AI grows in steps, from Turing’s early intentions in the 1940s, to Dettman’s work in the 1960s, and Ruth’s contribution of incorporating Mary Bradford’s diary into MARY’s memory, to Chinn’s breakthrough, programming in personality in 2019. The babybot iteration of MARY in the form of Eva takes place, presumably, in or near 2040. The notion of an over-involving AI/human relationship had its roots in the 1960s work of Joseph Weizenbaum, who wrote a text computer interface called ELIZA, that could mimic the responses one might get from a Rogerian shrink. Surprisingly, users became emotionally involved with it. The freezing withdrawal symptomology that Hall’s fictional children experience was based on odd epidemic in Le Roy, New York, in which many high school girls developed bizarre symptoms en masse as a result of stress. And lest you think Hall’s AI notions will remain off stage for many years, you might need to reconsider. While I was working on this review the NY Times published a singularly germane article. Substitute Hello Barbie for Babybot and the future may have already arrived. Hello, Barbie - from the New York TimesBut Speak is not merely a nifty sci-fi story. Just as the voice you hear when you interact with Siri represents the external manifestation of a vast amount of programming work, so the AI foreground of Speak is the showier manifestation of some serious contemplation. There is much concern here for memory, time, and how who we are is constructed. One character says, “diaries are time capsules, which preserve the minds of their creators in the sequences of words on the page.” Mary Bradford refers to her diary, Book shall serve as mind’s record, to last through generations. Where is the line between human and machine? Ruth and Turing want to use AI technology to recapture the essence of lost ones. Is that even possible? But are we really so different from our silicon simulacra? Eva, an nth generation babybot, speaks with what seems a lyrical sensibility, whereas Mary Bradford’s sentence construction sounds oddly robotic. The arguments about what separates man from machine seem closely related to historical arguments about what separates man from other animals, and one color of human from another. Turing ponders: I’ve begun to imagine a near future when we might read poetry and play music for our machines, when they would appreciate such beauty with the same subtlety as a live human brain. When this happens I feel that we shall be obliged to regard the machines as showing real intelligence. Eva’s poetic descriptions certainly raise the subject of just how human her/it’s sensibility might be. In 2019, when Stephen Chinn programmed me for personality. He called me MARY3 and used me for the babybots. To select my responses, I apply his algorithm, rather than statistical analysis. Still, nothing I say is original. It’s all chosen out of other people’s responses. I choose mostly from a handful of people who talked to me: Ruth Dettman, Stephen Chinn, etc.Gaby: So really I’m kind of talking to them instead of talking to you?MARY3: Yes, I suppose. Them, and the other voices I’ve captured.Gaby: So, you’re not really a person, you’re a collection of voices.MARY3: Yes. But couldn’t you say that’s always the case? If we are the sum of our past and our reactions to it, are we less than human when our memories fade away. Does that make people who suffer with Alzheimers more machine than human? Stylistically, Hall has said A psychologist friend once told me that she advises her patients to strive to be the narrators of their own stories. What she meant was that we should aim to be first-person narrators, experiencing the world directly from inside our own bodies. More commonly, however, we tend to be third-person narrators, commenting upon our own cleverness or our own stupidity from a place somewhat apart - from offtheshelf.com which goes a long way to explain her choice of narrative form here. Hall is not only a novelist, but a published poet as well and that sensibility is a strong presence here as well. For all the sophistication of story-telling technique, for all the existential foundation to the story, Speak is a moving, engaging read about interesting people in interesting times, facing fascinating challenges. It will speak to you.Are you there?Can you hear me?Published 7/7/15Review – 9/18/15=============================EXTRA STUFFThe author’s personal websiteA piece Hall wrote on Jane Austen for Off the ShelfInterviews-----NPR - NPR staff-----KCRWHave a session with ELIZA for yourselfRay Kurzweil is interested in blurring the lines between people and hardware. What if your mind could be uploaded to a machine? Sounds very cylon-ic to meIn case you missed the link in the review, Barbie Wants to Get to Know Your Child - NY Times – by James VlahosAnd another recent NY Times piece on AI, Software Is Smart Enough for SAT, but Still Far From Intelligent, by John MarkoffDecember 2016 - Smithsonian Magazine - Smile, Frown, Grimace and Grin — Your Facial Expression Is the Next Frontier in Big Data - by Jerry Adler - Rana El Kaliouby is a 30-something tech whiz who is looking to incorporate a bit more emotion into our digital-human communications, giving computers the ability to detect human emotional states in real time. There are certainly many useful applications for this. Still, I can see HAL using the talent to keep one step ahead of Dave. And if reading faces is an entry point, it cannot be long before the same technology is applied to making android faces communicate using facial expression as well. (link added in May 2017) In Summer 2019, GR reduced allowable review space by 25% - thus it was necessary to move some of this review to Comment #1

This book is a little outlandish...Surprisingly touching warm qualities--The structure of 'Speak' is unique...interlinking together six narrative voices -Artificial intelligence is linked with humans desires for intimacy - and connections.There is so much emotion felt. My mind was thinking - yet my heart was feeling empathy for these characters and their situations.It's complex and will have you seriously thinking about how much our memories mean to us. "SPEAK" touches on the feasible negative repercussions that artificial intelligence could have on the way we interact with each other. I didn't need to look far to see the way Technology has stolen and manipulated our lives now...But "SPEAK" isn't dull in any shape or form. The characters shift between time andgeographyUnique voices: every time I tried to write a review describing each of them- I realized that unless you read about them yourselves -- they make little sense...yet, this book is not hard to follow. The characters are distinctive: we can feel their loneliness - their desires for communication. Their desire to express love. I read that some people compared this to Cloud Atlas- well, for me, SPEAK is nothing like Cloud Atlas. The structure is completely different -going back and forth in time. The only puzzle here is trying to figure out how these voices will connect with each other. Where some dystopia books leave us feeling despair aboutour future...'SPEAK' walks us down paths of hope, too. We are reminded that we have choices. One just needs to get out in nature - walk along the ocean, through the forest, to feel our own inner strength expand - our heart open....to experience the great depths of gratitude. The book cover is gorgeous as well as the artistry of the storytelling.

Actual rating : somewhere between 3.5 and 4 It was a different book, sometimes I liked it sometime not. I'm not usually eager about reading letter like books or even diaries and that's why I didn't enjoy this book completely.In this book there are letters from a man to his wife/a man to his best friend(crush)' mother/ a man from the criminal facility to his divorced wife,a crippled girl chat with a robot and a diary of a newly wed 16 years old woman. They lived in different period from past to future. The letters from the husband to wife was my least favorite and the chat between the girl and the robot was the part I enjoyed the most.

If I have to compare this book to something, it would be Cloud Atlas. It lacks that books complex structure, but does tell a story that involves one sprawling theme through several narratives set over the course of several hundred years. From a girl's diary in the 1600's to a discarded robot in a warehouse in the future. Both books are patchworks from many styles and genres as well. And I enjoyed both books very much.Hall's novel is fascinating and I would like little more than to sit down with her and ask hundreds of questions about how she conceptualized the book and where it came from. This book is about humanity and consciousness and intelligence and connection. It is about all those things that make us human and what happens when artificial intelligence becomes so close to human intelligence that it's hard to tell the difference. It includes Alan Turing as a main character (which I'm sure for some people will be enough to get them automatically on board), and in fact 3 of the novel's main characters are people who build intelligent machines. Seeing Turing through to the inventor of the "Baby Bot," which is the main focus of the novel, is fascinating enough as it is. The central story is that of the Baby Bots, all the other stories are in some ways precursors or parallels to it. These robots were basically like an intelligent Cabbage Patch Kid, a craze that swept the world, and that eventually led to unintended consequences and catastrophe. Again, that hook alone is probably enough to get a lot of people on board. Despite all that, this is often a slow and meditative novel. Two of the narratives are letters, two are diaries, one is a soliloquy told to no one, and one is a dialogue. It can be a little choppy. My biggest issue was one that almost always happens to me when a novel is broken into multiple perspectives. I fall in love with one aspect so deeply that it's hard for me to switch. Here it was the story of Mary, the 13-year-old girl in the 1660's whose life is suddenly changing from that of a protected girl to that of a very unprepared woman in a new world. I would have read an entire novel of that diary and it was always hard to switch gears. It's heartbreaking and lovely and best read when your brain wants something to really think about.

It's hard to explain how much of an impact this book had on me, which is ironic, given that the book is all about language and speech. While at first glance it might seem that this is a science fiction tale about artificial intelligence gone wrong, it is a beautifully interwoven narrative on ideas of what makes us human and forms our personality. What truly forms our self-identity? Do we have free will, or are we a collection of algorithms built upon the experience of our lives, our experiences, our parents, friends, and what we read? Is it as the AI suggests, that, like Wittegenstein philosophized, that we are imprisoned by our language, our 'algorithms' limited by our lack of knowledge and experience. The book asks to what extent is emotion truly felt, or, is emotion itself a product of socialization. In basic psychology, I remember learning that if a young child falls, the child's reaction will be determined on whether the parents smile and laugh or react as in concern of injury. Could the same not be said about emotions like our ideas about love, influenced by literature, film, and our parents? Have you ever known someone so well, for instance your parents, that you can imagine with some degree of certainty how they would react to a certain question or stimulus? Perhaps that is their personality branded upon us. Is it really so far-fetched that an algorithm could be superimposed into a computer program, emulating the responses of a human? This book raises so many questions about what it means to be human that I truly cannot do it justice in this short review. I will close it by saying the writing is stellar, the characters believable and genuine, and unless you are made of stone, will bring tears to your eyes. 5/5Read as part of the Litograph's book club.

Powerful, poignant, and deep, Speak has an unusual structure, weaving together six narrative voices that together illuminate a link between the creation of artificial intelligence and the fundamental human yearning for connection. When I started the book its nonlinear format put me off, but it took just a few chapters for me to become totally hooked. The narrators include a Pilgrim or Puritan girl leaving her former life behind to journey to America, AI pioneer and WWII code-breaker Alan Turing, and a now illegal, slowly “dying” babybot--a doll of the future so lifelike and compelling that children who had one couldn’t bond with people--as it slowly loses power and memory. I don't normally pay much attention to epigraphs, but I love Speak's. One is from Notes From Underground by Dostoevsky, while the other comes from what I think is Disney's Snow White: “Slave in the magic mirror, come from farthest outer space, through wind and darkness I summon thee. Speak!”

(3.5) There’s a lot going on in this novel about artificial intelligence, which switches between six voices. We have a teenage girl who’s distraught after losing her AI companion, known as a ‘babybot’; the voice of one of the bots, on its way to be destroyed; and the prison memoir of the man who invented them. There are also narratives belonging to the programmers who worked on the AI in the 1960s; the real-life computer scientist Alan Turing, writing letters about his idea of a machine that can learn; and the diary of a young woman in the 17th century. (If you’re wondering what the last one is doing in a sci-fi novel, it’s one of the things the AI is trained on.)In fact, you could say that there’s too much happening in Speak, but I have a weakness for this kind of fragmented narrative, and the different threads are balanced well. It never quite feels like you get to spend enough time with each narrator. Sometimes this is a blessing: I did not want to read any more about Karl fucking Dettman (I haven’t hated a fictional character so much in quite some time). Sometimes it’s a curse: I was fascinated by Gaby’s chat transcripts and Mary’s diary, and would have loved more of both. Either way, this approach means Speak possesses a momentum that’s difficult to resist. Though I’m not sure I’ll remember the story for years to come, it held my attention, and sometimes that’s all you need.TinyLetter | Linktree

I loved this book. How to describe it? Well, Emily St. John Mandel (author of "Station Eleven," which I also loved) wrote, "Speak is that rarest of finds: a novel that doesn't remind me of any other book I've ever read." But I have to disagree with that. Either that or Ms. Mandel has never read "The Cloud Atlas" or anything by Margaret Atwood, which I find hard to believe. ;)"Speak" is about artificial intelligence, but also about the connections between people and between people and machines. It's about language. It's about love lost, love found.It very much reminds me of "The Cloud Atlas" in structure, but it is tauter and more focused in theme. There is a dystopian element to it, which reminds me of Atwood and other authors of dystopian fiction, including Mandel.The story is told through five voices:- a robot in the not-so-different future with artificial intelligence that was deemed too lifelike- the creator of that robot (and its brethren)- a 13-year-old Puritan girl sailing to the American colonies- a couple from the 1960's- Alan TuringHall rotates between the voices, and there isn't much "action" per se, but over the course of the story we get a sense for how Turing, the couple from the 60's, and the robot's creator all advanced the field of AI... and we get a sense for where AI (and man's disregard for overconsumption) led us to where we are today (2040). The voices are each distinct but they complement each other and layer upon each other -- echoing themes and imagery as well.Beautifully written (Hall is clearly smart and very very good at writing).My only gripe is that the end was a bit... neither here nor there.

Perfect, just perfect. Five tales over five centuries, bound by yearning for intimacy and understanding, looking for it in the wrong places.Mary Bradford travels to the New World with her new husband, who is thrust upon her the day before the voyage. She clings to her dog & her diary as her confidantes & companions, shunning the patient man trying to be her mate.Alan Turing finds a confidante and companion early in life, despite the odds: he is awkward, intellectual, & homosexual, at a time when to be so is illegal. Yet he loses that companion to illness. So he diverts his energy into scientific pursuits, & correspondence with his lost love's mother. Karl & Ruth Dettman escaped Nazi Germany, found each other in America, yet cannot find compatability. He creates the MARY program for Ruth, who entrusts it with the diary of Mary Bradford, which she has edited & shaped into a book. Ruth wants more from this early AI project; Karl realizes he wants more from Ruth. She embraces MARY, gets one of his grad students to enhance it & create MARY2; he rejects AI, & becomes a voice against the inhumanity humanity is building into its own culture.Stephen Chinn is a later echo of Turing in many ways: awkward & ostracized; successful & lonely. But he stands on the shoulders of successful scientists, & builds a seduction program. It works so well he writes a book about it, & ruins dating for everyone. He eventually falls in love the old-fashioned way, by slowing down enough to notice the beauty of a person right in front of him. They build a life & a family. But when his daughter is about to enter school, he fears she will have struggles similar to his own. So he builds her a doll, to be her constant companion, drawing from the MARY2 model. MARY3 is a smashing success; soon every girl has one of her own. And Stephen is left with no family, and charges against him for corrupting society.Gaby White is one such girl who didn't live a day of her life without her babybot... until the government banned them and confiscated them. Young girls are "freezing", seizing & stiffening, being rendered incapable of movement, speech, but most of all incapable of feeling anything. It's a national epidemic. It lands Stephen Chinn in an actual prison, & Gaby & her peers in virtual prisons, as their condition sparks quarantines, not to mention the lack of desire to interact.Louisa Hall makes magic with these characters. She uses her words like a paintbrush: like a master with a well-chosen palette, she adds depth, perspective, shadow, light, all with a few strokes. Step back & you see the whole clearly. That image over there, that you thought was a decorative swirl? It's a key theme, & you'll see it all over the canvas when you look at it carefully. You thought that was an angry, insistent man; you thought that one there was a dejected, devoted lover. But wait until she's done, and then look again. You'll see it all, the full complicated humanity of each of these characters. And each one is contained in all of us at some time in our lives.I'm so glad I took a chance on this book. I have a feeling I'll be talking about it all year.

Judge this book by its cover: It’s as beautiful on the inside as it is on the outside.Literary fiction with a sci-fi edge, Speak masterfully weaves five distinct stories that span centuries – from a feisty young woman traveling to America in the 17th century to mathematical genius Alan Turing to a former inventor in a dystopian future imprisoned for creating illegally lifelike artificial intelligence.The stories all connect in subtle yet meaningful ways, exploring timeless aspects of humanity such as existential loneliness, communication and connection, and challenging us to question to what extent language and memory define who we are.

What do a traumatized girl, a computer science professor, a puritan newlywed, the Fibonacci Theorem, a incarcerated cyber criminal, Alan Turing, and a chat bot have in common? More than you might think! This is an amazing book that trolls the minds of these people and things looking for answers to a number of timely questions. What is consciousness? Can a computer be sentient? Is it possible to digitize empathy? Is a binary numbers machine capable of seduction? Can a robot be too human? If these questions interest you this book should go to the top of your to-read list.

I really enjoyed this one, even though I expected something quite different. It is much more an exploration of memory and the history of computing than a science fiction novel. But the language is captivating, the different voices are really 'different', and Mary Bradford's 17th century diary is hilarious.

I can’t do this one in six words either.What makes a conversational relationship human? This is one of the questions that this novel creatively asks. It might be one of the best novels I’ve read on the issue of how women are not listened to by men—even the men who are closest to them. The men in this novel don’t understand that their communications are one-sided, that their worlds hardly ever adjust to the women in their lives. But the women’s worlds always do. To put this question in a novel about AI is a brilliant move. The title could’ve been Echo, as in Echo and Narcissus. But Speak is just as good a title. The novel feels like a wonderful response to the (not surprisingly) comparatively verbose novel by Richard Powers called Galatea 2.2. In Galatea 2.2, the narrator and protagonist Richard Powers recognizes himself as wanting the AI machine (Helen) to echo him; he recognizes his narcissism is causing him to commit an anthropomorphism of the machine. He recognizes it but he is unable to do anything about it. Hall’s novel doesn’t offer solutions either, but it gets this issue so poignantly. I wish every man in academia— heck every man in any marriage – would read it.Many men fill up space with their words, not seeing that they do this, not seeing it as dominating, and unless and until they do, women in their worlds will still feel silenced and eclipsed, even those who know that they are loved. I have said that Hall gives no answers but that may not be right. The novel is itself a kind of answer. Creativity. Stepping outside of the known boundaries—outside of well-worn and potentially abusive patterns, even patterns of seduction. Of seductions of all sorts. In short, this novel is truly remarkable.

Speak is a story about artificial intelligence, but not in the usual way. Hall isn't really interested in how it will happen - the tech, the business, the laws - far more in how we will react to it. In how it will force us to define ourselves. We're so very alone as a species - the only member of Homo still extant, the only (as far as we're able to define it) intelligent creature on the only planet where we've found life. Do we even, without leaning on 3,000-year-old texts, know what it means to be alive, to be intelligent, to have what we for lack of a better word might call a soul? We are Homo Narrans; narrating man. We define ourselves by stories, our big brains filled with thousands of virtual copies of everyone from The Cat in the Hat to our closest most loved ones, ascribe humanity to our pets and our favourite literary characters, we raise our children to be - implicitly or ex - little copies of ourselves in both DNA and experience, but we recoil at the idea of a bank of circuitry having life, having intelligence, being as opposed to existing. And yet we can't help but conceive (of) it, we need somethiing like it, a perfection of something that's built into us. We imagine a thunderclap when machines go from servitude to sentience; Skynet becoming self-aware and immediately declaring war. Speak refuses that simple, binary definition, itself inhumane. It blurs lines. It tells stories.Remember me, I whispered to the ocean, rolling over his bones. Remember me, I whispered to Ralph. Remember me. Remember me.Speak, then, is a polyphonic novel: In the mid-21st century a disconnected, recently declared illegal robot is being carted off to a storage somewhere out in what is now the Texas desert, to be piled among thousands of others to rust away. As her... sorry, its power runs down, it remembers - because computers are nothing if not memory, Moore's Law and all that - the people that mattered to it. Some of which (sorry, of whom) it actually met, some it only knows from the long, detailed stories its programmers fed it to teach it how to simulate life. - A teenage girl in 17th century Britain, about to embark on a ship to the colonies, through her diary.- Alan Turing, through his decades of correspondence with the mother of his college, ahem, "friend". The father of artificial intelligence, ultimately doomed to chemical castration that effectively robbed him of free will, how's that for irony?- A married Jewish couple in late-60s San Francisco, working on early computers and the philosophy of AI, while repressing their memories of fleeing Germany.- The autobiography of the AI's creator, written in jail, about growing up a clever nerd-cum-pickup artist always looking to perfect things.- The chat logs of another iteration of the AI, and a young girl spending her life alone in front of a computer screen.Of course, as the narrator (can an AI even be called a narrator, strictly speaking?) points out, it can only quote them. It has no feelings of its own, it's been told. But for some reason, as its battery indicator starts flashing red and all but the most crucial systems shut down waiting for a recharge that will never happen, it must tell these stories. Just like the people in them had to, had to keep explaining how they see themselves, how they see each other, what they remember and carry with them, what is real and what is just figments of large brains filled with stories desperate for those of others.The pornographer on my left types with one forefinger, a demented chicken, pecking away. A tax evader is chewing on his fingernails. We’re all staring at our screens, stuck here, hoping somehow to break free. Wishing for more than we’ve been given. My cursor blinks, blinks, blinks. A wall that appears and disappears, appears and disappears once again. Unceasing. Questioning. What will come next? it wants to know. It prods me forward, blinking and blinking. Do not stop talking, it reminds me. Do not stop speaking. You can never come to an end.Speak is a beautiful novel, sometimes perhaps too beautiful - occasionally, the voices sound a little too similar, as if Hall's voice comes through. (Because obviously, it can't be the novel's official narrator putting its own spin on things. Right?) There's an elegiac stillness to it; I'm reminded of Paddy McAloon's magnificent song "I Trawl The Megahertz", which he pieced together from snatches of late-night phone-in radio shows after losing his eyesight. As all the stories we tell about others also tell ourselves, the story of artificial intelligence must also be about human intelligence; in asking ourselves whether a computer can do more than repeat what it's been told, imitate behaviour, deliver pre-programmed responses to fixed questions, regurgitate facts and sum up numbers, most writers would ask whether human beings can do any more. The neat thing about Speak is that it seems to ask if we, empathetic, flawed, storytellers that we are, could ever do any less.