Half a Conversation: Who Should Hear the Machine?

Here is where I have landed. Talking to an artificial intelligence (AI) in front of other people is courteous only when everyone present can hear both sides of the exchange, or when nobody can hear either side. The half-heard version, where you speak out loud and the answer comes back to you alone, is the one that grates. On a train, keep the whole exchange private. Round a table where everyone has a stake, let the machine answer the whole table.

That is an architect's answer, because it is really a question about rooms.

The passenger in seat 14

You know the scene. A carriage, a grey afternoon, and someone two rows back on the phone. You can hear every word they say and none of the words said to them. Within a minute you are irritated, and it is hard to say exactly why. They are not shouting. Two friends talking at the same volume would not bother you half as much.

I think the reason is this. When someone reads a screen, they take something in privately and the room is untouched. The moment they speak, they put an event into a shared space that everyone else has to receive through their ears, with no say in it. And when only one side of that event is audible, your mind keeps reaching for the missing half.

A sound you cannot answer, and cannot finish hearing, is a sound you cannot ignore.

Two people talking in front of you is a whole thing. You can tune it out. Half a conversation is a puzzle left on the table.

What the railway already says

The railway has a rule that covers this without mentioning phones or machines at all. Byelaw 7(1) of the Railway Byelaws, published by the Department for Transport, says that, except with written permission from an operator, no person on the railway shall, "to the annoyance of any person", sing, or "use any instrument, article or equipment for the production or reproduction of sound" (GOV.UK, Railway Byelaws).

I am not a lawyer, and I am not saying that asking a machine a question on the 08:12 is an offence. What interests me is the test the byelaw chooses. It does not ban sound. It bans sound that becomes an imposition on someone else. A phone that speaks its answers aloud is plainly equipment reproducing sound, so the same test would apply to it.

A room built round a one-sided call

Architecture has dealt with half a conversation before. The red telephone kiosk was, in effect, a small room built round a one-sided call: it put a door between the person talking and the street.

Three Rivers District Council, in Hertfordshire, considered a Grade II listed kiosk in Rickmansworth in 2018. Its committee report quotes the list description: "Telephone kiosk. Type K6. Designed 1935 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Made by various contractors. Cast iron. Square kiosk with domed roof." The council's conservation officer wrote that "the special character of a K6 box is integral with the use for which it was originally designed" (Three Rivers District Council).

Red telephone kiosks: each one a room for a single voice. Photo: Karen Uppal on Unsplash.

The phone has long since left the box. We carried the half-conversation back out into the street and the carriage, and now we are about to do it again with machines that answer back.

Four ways to ask a machine something in company

Set out by who can hear what, the options look like this. The verdicts are my opinion, not a rule.

How you ask	Who hears the question	Who hears the answer	My verdict
Type it, read the reply	Nobody	Nobody	Courteous anywhere
Say it aloud, reply in your ear	Everyone near you	You alone	The phone call in seat 14; avoid it in shared space
Say it aloud, reply aloud	Everyone near you	Everyone near you	Honest; right when everyone present has a stake
Type it, reply aloud	Nobody	Everyone near you	The room hears an answer to a question it never heard; avoid it

The pattern is symmetry. The two rows that work are the ones where the room hears both halves or neither. The two that grate leave the room holding half.

So which should it be?

Both, depending on whose room it is.

In a public space that strangers share, such as a train, a waiting room or a library, the private, silent exchange is the courteous one. Even a full two-sided conversation with a machine is a lot to ask of a carriage, in the same way a loud conversation between two passengers is.

In a room where everyone present has a stake, the answer flips. There, the reciprocal version, where the machine speaks and everyone hears, is the better one. It turns the machine from a whisper in one person's ear into something closer to a participant the whole table can hear, question and disagree with. I think that is where this is heading, and I think it is healthier.

At the kitchen table

This is where it touches my own work. A meeting about an old building is usually a handful of people round a kitchen table, or standing in a cold room with a torch: the owner, perhaps a builder, sometimes the council's conservation officer. I described what I look for on that first visit in what a heritage architect looks for on the first visit.

My rule for those meetings is simple, and it would hold for a phone call to someone off site as much as for any machine: what is said to the table, the table hears. Nobody in a conversation about your house should be taking advice the rest of you cannot hear.

Rooms have always carried rules of this kind. When I read a listed interior room by room, as I set out in which parts of a listed interior can change, part of what the plan tells me is who was meant to hear whom: the hall, the parlour, the back stair. The machines are new. The question of who gets to hear is very old.

This is a step sideways from the autumn round of the first fire, the windows and the gutters, and the house will still be there when we go back to it. The kiosk in this one stands in Hertfordshire, where much of my work is: see the Hertfordshire page.

For what it is worth, I am hopeful. We worked out the telephone box once. I expect we will work this out too, and that the good version will be the one where everyone in the room can hear.

If your own building has a question in it, Speak to Giles: book a call, write through the contact page, ring +44 (0)7737 745211, or leave a WhatsApp voice note. Both sides of that conversation, you will be glad to hear, are audible.

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Photo: Russell Pecoraro on Unsplash.

Giles Paul Shorter — RIBA Chartered Architect · ARB Registered · RIBA Conservation Registrant · 17+ years specialising in listed and historic buildings.