You might not think about it very often, but we are living
through a golden age of technology.
Our homes and our pockets are full of inventions and gadgets that 20
years ago would have been the stuff of science fiction.
Alexa, how exactly do you work?
Hmm. I don't know that.
That's what we're going to find out.
These things have become such an integral part of our everyday
lives that we've forgotten to remember how clever they are.
I'm Professor Hannah Fry, and I want to open your eyes...
I'm having a great time.
..to the secret genius of everyday objects.
CARD READER BEEPS
The ones that we take for granted.
Items that owe their existence
to generations of scientific innovation.
THE Edison drove an electric car?! Yeah, this one.
In every episode, I'm going to take one item...
..and tear it apart...
..bit...
Oh!
..by bit...
So now there's some stuff you can see.
..meet the people behind it...
Frankly, I thought many things were impossible.
..and unlock the remarkable...
Here is the clandestine listening device.
..and sometimes hilarious stories...
..behind its invention.
Hello. Look at you.
This time, it's the virtual assistant.
More and more of us now have devices that allow us to control things
in our home using just our voices.
Alexa, how are you doing?
I'm feeling perplexed.
For some reason, people keep asking if I fancy a cuppa.
It's all thanks to the secret tech used to hunt U-boats...
..a 1940s star who had a double life as an inventor...
I could promise you so many things.
..and a 1960s sci-fi villain.
I'm sorry, Dave.
I'm afraid I can't do that.
This is Amazon's swanky London HQ.
It's quite cool in here, isn't it?
I'm here to meet the people behind the world's
best-selling virtual assistant -
the Amazon Alexa.
And this is a story that starts with a sketch.
I think this actually gives you the best view, and it shows
the drawing Jeff drew on the whiteboard.
That's Rohit Prasad, head of Alexa.
So this is Jeff's handwriting? I think so. Yes.
But this is the original sketch.
Alexa was conceived in 2011 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The hasty sketch on a whiteboard was his vision
of a virtual assistant butler.
They were dreaming about a Star Trek computer.
Isn't "mic" spelt M-I-C? Yeah!
THEY LAUGH
I know. I really love the idea that there are some people in the world
who can just scribble something like that on a whiteboard,
and be like, "I've made the invention.
"Now you go and sort out the details."
But Alexa isn't alone.
Hang on a minute.
There's now a virtual assistant in around half of all UK homes,
and a wide range of different types, like Apple Siri...
Hello, there, viewer.
..and Google Assistant.
Nice to see you.
I'm going to take apart the virtual assistant
and look at five key components.
From its microphones to its microprocessor.
But first up is the part that is most familiar.
It's where speaker meets software...
..to create Alexa's iconic voice.
Here it is, then.
An Alexa.
Alexa, do you mind if I use a screwdriver to open you?
Sorry, I'm not sure about that. Hmm.
Well, I'm sorry, Alexa.
It's not your lucky day, because I have a very impressive
array of tools, and I know how to use them.
Oh! There we go.
I want to find out where this voice comes from.
And you can start to see what is within.
And there it is.
This little speaker. At its heart,
this is... This works the same way as a normal speaker does.
It's just got a little membrane, some magnets that pull that membrane
back and forth to vibrate the air, according to whatever electrical
signal is being passed along this wire.
And as for what electrical signal is passed along the wire,
that all comes down to the other
side, and the brains of the device.
This is a microprocessor.
That's the key to its processing power.
We'll do more on that later.
But it still needs a clever computer program to make it speak.
We've moved far more towards giving options, letting people have a male
voice if they want one,
a female voice as well.
EMAIL PINGS
And I've got an email. That's good to know.
Thank you, laptop.
That is Trevor Wood.
He's Alexa's senior speech scientist.
And his day job is to try and make Alexa sound as natural as possible.
When you first wanted to create a voice that could be part
of an assistant like this,
how do you go about that?
We need Alexa to be able to say any possible sentence.
So, to build a voice in the old days, and the old days means
before about 2017,
we used to record lots of data with a voice actor.
They recorded every sound in the English language
so that they could build any word that Alexa might have to say.
So you can think of it as like getting you to read every single
word in the dictionary.
And then when we've got all of the words, we can string them
together to make any sentence we like.
We need tens of hours of data just to be able to build
a single voice.
This time-consuming technique worked in the first iteration of the voice,
but the ups and downs of natural speech weren't quite right.
ROBOTIC FEMALE VOICE: Star Trek is an American media franchise based on
the science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry.
That is how Alexa sounded back in 2014.
Compare that to today.
NATURAL FEMALE VOICE: Star Trek is an American media franchise based on
the science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry.
That is a pretty impressive improvement
in just the last eight years.
But how do virtual assistants produce such lifelike voices?
The answer lies deep in the past.
The year is 1939.
No, not that 1939.
Not yet, anyway.
THIS one.
3,000 miles away
in New York, with minds free of the threat of war,
people were able to celebrate the technological advancements
of the era with a World Fair.
Isn't it wonderful, Nick? Beautiful.
What do you want to do?
Anything but inspect this temple of capitalism. Oh, Nick!
Some of the exhibits were pretty crazy.
Yes, that's a smoking robot. And no, you can't buy one.
And, folks, he's only two years old.
However, there was one exhibit that was stealing
all of the attention.
It might look like a futuristic church organ,
but it had a very special talent.
It could speak.
Helen, will you have the Voder say "greetings, everybody"?
ROBOTIC VOICE: Greetings, everybody.
It was the first device that could generate continuous human
sounding speech electronically.
ROBOTIC VOICE: Ha, ha, ha.
It was called the Voice Operating Demonstrator, or Voder...
ROBOTIC VOICE: A, B, C...
..and synthesised speech was born.
Invented by telephone pioneer Homer Dudley of Bell Labs,
it reproduced the basic building blocks of human speech.
The ethereal robotic voice could speak, sing and even change pitch.
HIGH-PITCHED VOICE
VOICE DROPS IN PITCH
Ultimately, Dudley's Voder was too cumbersome
for any useful purpose.
The outbreak of World War II set the stage for the next big
development in synthetic voice technology.
The British government needed a secure way to communicate
with their American allies.
As soon as you want to communicate across the Atlantic, you have to use
something like radio waves, at which point...
..anyone can listen in.
Obviously, that's not ideal, but the solution would come
from our old pal Homer Dudley and work that he'd done
on undersea telegram cables.
We've got all of these cables that are laid across the Atlantic.
The problem is, is that the amount of information that you can transmit
down one of these cables is absolutely minuscule.
So, maybe enough for a telegram, but definitely not enough for a
phone call, because there is way too much information contained in a
recording of the human voice.
Dudley built a bit of tech called the vocoder.
It compressed the voice enough to transmit by undersea cable.
It wasn't implemented until the Allies realised
that it gave them a way to encrypt voices
and prevent enemy eavesdropping.
Sound is just essentially air wobbling.
When we speak, our vocal cords vibrate, creating thousands
of different wobbles in the air.
So what Homer Dudley realised was that you don't need to hear every
single one of those wobbles.
So he worked out a way to get rid of almost all of them and take
the most important, some high-pitched, some low-pitched,
and only transmit that much smaller
message down the cable, across the Atlantic.
And that is what the electronics of his vocoder did.
Homer Dudley shrunk down the human voice so that it could finally fit.
Now, the thing is, is that you are left with something
that you can understand, but it is something
without any of the nuance of human speech.
ROBOTIC VOICE: Something without any of the nuance of human speech.
Quite robotic, isn't it?
But that didn't bother the allied forces.
The compressed signal could easily be encrypted to keep messages secure
and sent via radio waves.
ARCHIVE: The magic of physics converting sound
into electrical impulses.
The vocoder was codenamed SIGSALY,
and the US Army commissioned Bell Labs to build 12 of them.
The role of the vocoder in securing secret communications
between Churchill and President Roosevelt almost certainly helped
to secure a victory.
ARCHIVE: Now the world was truly ready for peace.
And it was the first time that humans were able
to electronically recreate speech in real time.
By the late 1970s and '80s, the vocoder made
a resurgence once again.
When I go and press one of these notes, then something..
ROBOTIC VOICE: ..very strange will happen.
You may not realise it, but you've almost certainly listened
to a traditional vocoder, because it is in the music
of New Order, of Phil Collins, if that's your bag,
and my personal favourite, Daft Punk.
MUSIC: In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins
Why have you given me a Phil Collins record?
MUSIC: Around The World by Daft Punk
That's more like it.
But as a method of synthesising human speech,
the vocoder was limited.
It could only convert pre-existing human sentences
into a computer version. It couldn't generate new ones.
So Bell Labs tried a different approach.
They analysed the sound waves in human speech and tried to create
new sentences from scratch.
ROBOTIC VOICE: # Daisy, Daisy Give me your answer, do... #
By the 1970s, speech synthesis had made its way into children's toys,
like the Speak & Spell, which could read entire sentences
of synthesised speech.
ROBOTIC VOICE: Spell "rain". R-A-I-N. That is...
But let's face it, although you know what it's saying,
it hardly sounds human.
For that to happen, we need to fast forward a few years.
Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
I'm sorry, Dave.
I'm afraid I can't do that.
That is HAL from the trailer for the film 2001.
In the actual early 2000s, that film inspired a company called Ivona
to try a new approach to creating speech.
FEMALE VOICE: Hi, I am Ivona.
I speak languages you need with voices you will love.
I will read out loud...
They recorded an actor's voice and split it into fragments
called diphones.
Then their code blended it together into natural-sounding
words and sentences.
My voice is not human. Would you believe?
The results impressed Amazon so much
that they bought the company, and it went on to become
the basis for Alexa.
ALEXA: We've come a long way in 70 years.
Back at Amazon, Trevor thinks that we might be on the verge of creating
synthetic voices that are almost indistinguishable from humans.
So, in the last five years, pretty much everything has been replaced
by neural networks.
And that gives us new kinds of adaptability.
Ah, neural networks.
These are a special set of algorithms that are inspired
by how our brains process information.
This allows Alexa to learn as we do,
listening to speech and working out
the complexity and nuances of language.
ARCHIVE: Human speech, seemingly so simple,
is very complicated.
And that's what lets Alexa produce far more natural patterns
of speech like this...
NATURAL FEMALE VOICE: I wonder what's going to happen in the story.
The neural networks mean that we don't need as much data
any more, so we can teach an old voice new tricks, a new accent,
a new emotion to express.
They can even reproduce your very own Hannah Fry.
We asked you to give us,
it was, I think, 19 sentences, about two minutes of data.
And we've used that to adapt a voice that we think captures something
about how you speak. Wait, hang on. Sorry. 19 sentences? Yeah.
So we've gone from needing tens of hours of data
down to about two minutes. Wait, you can...
You can make me say words that I didn't say
from 19 sentences alone?
I've got you here reading the abstract of Alan Turing's famous
paper on AI, so... OK, go on. Go on, I want to hear this.
IN HANNAH'S VOICE: I propose to consider the question - can machines
think? This should begin with definitions of the meaning
of the terms "machine" and "think". Oh!
The definitions might be framed so as to reflect
so far as possible the normal use of the word.
That was pretty good!
I think it captures something about your voice.
You are more challenging than we were expecting.
I mean, you're welcome.
There is so, so much sitting under this umbrella of making
a natural-sounding voice that goes far beyond just what they're saying.
I think in the past, especially when it was just chopped-up speech,
people used to think of the voice as just, "Well, as long
"as I can understand it, it's fine."
But actually, if you want to have a conversation,
how the person's voice sounds really is part of being a great AI.
We want to get Alexa there to have those human-like attributes,
to be able to have an engaging conversation with you.
So it's all thanks to extraordinary innovations in programming
that the voice coming from our virtual assistant speaker
is so true to life.
But a virtual assistant also needs ears, and that is where our second
component comes in.
It turns the sound of your voice into electrical impulses
that Alexa's brain can understand.
This is the microphone.
I don't know if you've ever played around with an Alexa, sometimes
you'll be standing right next to it and it'll ignore you.
But other times, you'll be, like, three rooms away
and it will light up at the sound of your voice.
And that makes me wonder - what kind of microphones does
it have inside that mean it's able to do that?
And then the follow-up question - does that mean
it's always listening?
Well, let me show you.
Take it apart.
HE LAUGHS
Open-heart surgery on Alexa. They don't normally come apart this easily.
Well, he WOULD say that.
That is Alexa's director of audio, Philip Hilmes.
Given all of the noise that's going on around, how does it know
what to listen to?
So the first thing it does is it tries to determine
is this audio speech or is it the dog barking, something like that.
Inside here, we have six different microphones.
One of the most amazing features of this virtual assistant's microphone
is that it can pick up your voice even when there is lots of
noise around it.
Now, Phil, I know that we wanted to do a bit of a demonstration
in a noisy, bustling cafe. Right.
And we are in what should be a noisy, bustling cafe,
except that we kicked everyone out so we could do some filming!
Yes. We've got an alternative, haven't we, for some cafe noise?
Alexa, play cafe sounds.
Is there something wrong with me?
I mean, I WAS going to buy one.
THEY LAUGH
Alexa, play cafe sounds.
LOUD RUSTLING
OK.
We're going to test whether another Alexa on the other side of the room
can hear us through all of this noise.
There's some people talking over there.
There's the screech of a buggy, of a mum desperate for some
caffeine, I can hear in the corner.
There's lots of stuff going on.
And, yes, even in an environment like this, if I just say to you,
"Alexa, what time is it?"
ALEXA: The time is 2:54pm.
That's right. Picks it up.
Alexa, stop.
CAFE HUBBUB STOPS
That was incredible. I mean, that was quite loud.
It was very loud, yeah.
And yet, all the way over there, that device was able to pick
up on the wake word from here.
It's all thanks to your virtual assistant's multiple microphones.
By having these six microphones, we're able to combine them together,
doing what we call beamforming.
Beamforming is the brilliant bit of tech that allows your virtual
assistant to pick up on your voice in even the noisiest environments.
ARCHIVE: There's a highly-refined and perfect mechanism...
To find out how we got beamforming, we need to go back in time...
..not to World War II...
..but to World War I.
By 1914, World War I was in full swing, and the British started
blockading all of the German ports, trying to cut
off their supply lines.
But the Germans, who were a bit penned in by this point,
did have one key advantage.
They had U-boats.
For anyone who hasn't seen Das Boot, U-boats were early submarines.
These are silent killers bristling with torpedoes, and they started
prowling along the coastline, picking off British ships supplying
food to our shores.
To avoid Britain being starved into submission, the Navy had to
find a way to locate and destroy the U-boats.
And there was one key weakness that they could exploit.
Sound.
If you have a clanky U-boat, people on board making
all sorts of noises...
The sound waves will propagate through the water
and can be picked up.
That is Patrick Naylor from Imperial College London,
and he is an acoustic scientist.
So, putting microphones underwater allows you to hear what is going
on below the surface and pick up and detect perhaps enemy vessels.
And that is exactly what the Navy did, using a brand-new
device called a hydrophone,
a microphone designed to work underwater.
They quickly proved effective.
A single microphone could pick up a German U-boat almost
four miles away.
One downside - it couldn't tell you where that U-boat was.
For that, they needed another crucial breakthrough,
led by a maverick sea captain called Cyril Ryan.
And their solution was simple -
use two microphones instead.
Patrick is going to demonstrate.
Here we have the microphone array, which is very much along the same
lines of the two hydrophones.
OK. So, if you have a little jingle over here...
So what we see here is the sound appearing on the left with a peak.
And as the sound moves into the centre, then the peak moves
to the centre. Hmm!
And then as the sound moves slowly to the right, we can see the peak
moves down to the right.
The sound arrives from different directions,
and it will have a different time of arrival at each microphone.
With a clever little bit of maths, you can then use the difference
in arrival time at the two microphones to work out
which direction the sound is coming from.
Using an array of microphones, that helped the Allies uncover a lot
of U-boats.
And today, less life-saving but still pretty helpful,
it allows your virtual assistant to pick out your voice
in a noisy room.
So when we have the microphone array, the microphones work together
and the signals are brought into an algorithm called
a beamforming algorithm.
At last, we are back to beamforming.
Beamforming.
Beamforming allows the array of microphones to focus on and boost
the sound from one direction only.
The beamforming algorithm will combine them in a way such
that from some directions, the sound will add up and get stronger,
whereas from other directions, the sound at the different
microphones will cancel itself out.
OK, so if you've got something really noisy that you don't want
to listen to going on over there, some building work going on,
you can deliberately cancel out all of that noise over there
and boost the noise from this direction.
Exactly. That's right.
I understand that in theory, but what does it actually sound
like when you do it?
Well, we have some bells coming from the left, and we have a
xylophone coming from the right.
First up, let's hear it without beamforming.
What you are hearing on the telly is what I'm hearing in my headphones.
RINGING AND CLANKING
I mean... OK. You two sound like the worst band of all time,
but thank you. OK, great.
The beamformer is now activated.
Focus on...
LOWER VOLUME: ..the bells.
Oh! You've suddenly gone quieter.
Ah, the beamformer's working.
RINGING AND CLANKING
And now, if we switch to the xylophone...
RINGING GETS QUIETER
Oh, that's so interesting!
Go back.
Back to the bells, and you'll hear it come much more into focus.
It is just... It's kind of strange, because it feels very similar
to sort of turning your head and focusing your full attention
on a particular noise.
But it's being done for you by the technology.
This is exactly what would happen in a smart home audio device,
where the device would need to listen in a certain direction
and focus its attention in that particular direction,
whilst suppressing the background noise coming from other directions.
Yeah. That was good. Thanks, guys.
Don't give up your day jobs.
ALEXA: Especially when us voice assistants take over.
Look, I'm a nerd.
And so the technology that lets your virtual assistant hear
you is one of my favourite things, but it does raise some questions.
So let's go back to Phil at Amazon.
Given that we're talking about microphones and we're talking
about Alexa even being able to listen in, even
in a really noisy room,
I guess the natural next question is, does that mean
it's always listening? No, not at all.
What they're doing is they're only looking for that wake word.
And so once we do that, then we turn on the rest of the system.
The thing about these devices is that you are essentially putting
an internet-enabled microphone in your house.
And I know that some people feel really uncomfortable about that,
whereas other people are totally fine with it.
Ultimately, all those concerns about privacy, they come down to,
do you believe that the company is not misusing your data?
Thanks to the microphone array and the genius
of beamforming, your virtual assistant is able to listen
to your questions with clarity.
But on its own, that is not enough for it to make sense
of what you're saying to it and reply with a sensible answer.
For Alexa to understand us,
it needs some sort of brain,
and that is powered by a key piece
of technology that isn't a physical component.
But trust me, it's vital.
It is a complex network of algorithms that form
Alexa's artificial intelligence.
Alexa is pretty good at answering difficult questions.
Alexa, what's the capital of the Solomon Islands?
The capital of the Solomon Islands is Honiara.
Pretty impressive. But let's push it a bit.
Come on. Something a bit more ambiguous.
Alexa, what is love?
Love is sharing your chocolate with someone, even if you want
to scoff it all yourself.
Hmm. We'll agree to disagree on that one.
It's the artificial intelligence that allows the Alexa to hear,
to respond, to answer your questions, to play music when you
want it to.
Its AI has been trained to interact with us in a way that feels human.
But how does AI manage this?
The answer starts 70 years ago.
In a 1950 paper, scientist Alan Turing posed the question -
can machines think?
It was one of the earliest explorations of what would become
known as artificial intelligence.
ARCHIVE: Anyone who urgently wishes to know whether two to the power of
127 minus one is a prime number or not can be given the answer
by an electronic brain.
In 1952, Christopher Strachey programmed a computer to play
a simple game of draughts.
When he fed in his 20 pages of code, his AI-driven draughts game
was challenging everyone in the lab.
It's time now that it got down to serious work.
In the mid 1960s,
AI was used in an interactive device.
ELIZA was the world's first chatbot, and could hold a basic conversation.
FEMALE VOICE: My boyfriend made me come here.
MALE VOICE: Your boyfriend made you come here.
It didn't have much chat, replying with only pre-programmed phrases.
MALE VOICE: I'm sorry to hear that you're depressed.
During the 1970s and early '80s,
AI's progress slowed, funding dried up, and the hardware available
struggled. It's not intelligence at all.
It adds up numbers and subtracts numbers and multiplies numbers
very, very quickly.
That changed with the advent of more powerful computers
in the late 1990s.
By 1997, AI even looked like a match for human intelligence.
IBM's most powerful supercomputer, Deep Blue, stunned the world
and defeated the best chess player on the planet,
grandmaster Garry Kasparov.
ARCHIVE: The game of chess, supposedly a true test of human
intellect, will never be the same again.
This looked as though AI was finally living up to the promise
of the 1950s, but then it proved to be a bit of a false dawn.
Deep Blue's moment in the spotlight wasn't the breakthrough it seemed,
and that is because the computer couldn't actually think for itself.
It was just following a set of rules.
When it comes to chess, you're on a very defined board.
All of the pieces have particular rules that are associated with them.
And all you needed to do, really, was write down those rules
in a way that a computer could understand, and then it
just had to crunch through those calculations.
The problem is, is that when you extend that out beyond the game
of chess into the real world, writing down all the rules becomes
really, really, really hard.
Almost as hard as I'm finding it to win this game.
CHESSBOARD BEEPS
All right, chill out.
I'm actually really competitive!
I'm unwilling to lose this game of chess, even though I know
that I'm actually supposed to be doing my job here.
And so tasks like chess - I won, by the way - that are based on a set
of simply defined rules could be mastered
if you had enough computing power.
But a lot of real-life challenges were REALLY hard for computers.
Let me illustrate with the help of an expert assistant.
Come here. Come sit here. Come here, come here, come here.
This is my daughter.
Say hello. Hello.
HANNAH LAUGHS
And what I thought I'd do is show you some pictures, and you have to
tell me what's in the pictures. OK? OK.
All right, then. So here we go. Let's have a look.
What's that picture?
A dog. A dog!
That's right. And this one?
A dog. A dog!
This is too easy for you. What's that?
A dog. OK, hang on. This one's tough. You ready?
What's this one?
A dog. A dog! Exactly.
So, these are quite different, these pictures.
And yet, even a three-year-old can recognise that every single one
of them is a dog.
Thank you.
That's because we humans quickly learn the features that similar
objects have in common, even when there's a lot of variety.
Until around ten years ago, computers found it surprisingly
difficult to tell the difference between images of dogs and cats.
If only you could get over that hurdle,
then that would be the advent of a whole new era of intelligence.
So, back in 2010, AI scientists launched a competition
called ImageNet.
The best computer scientists pitched their image recognition
software against each other.
All of the entries into this competition...
To put it nicely, they were rubbish.
You'd give them a really easy picture like a ball,
and they would get it right about 40% of the time.
And then, in 2012, there was one entry to the ImageNet competition
which came along and blew everyone away.
That top-dog programme went by the name of AlexNet.
It could successfully recognise 85% of images, a massive improvement
on anything that had come before.
And it was all thanks to a form of artificial intelligence
called deep learning.
Forget about writing down all the rules, just have a clear
objective and let the machine figure out all of the steps
along the way for itself.
Remember those neural networks that learn from experience
just like us?
Well, deep learning is kind of like an advanced version of that.
So the more experience that you give it to learn from, data like pictures
or voice, the better it will become.
This isn't just some niche bit of tech.
Actually, you will find deep learning within most people's
mobile phones. So if I search for "dog" on all of the photos on
my phone, rather than trying to find a picture that 100% matches
a rigid template,
deep learning looks for features, like the shadow that might appear
under a snout or the wispiness that might indicate a tail.
And then if the AI decides there are enough doggie features,
it will classify the image as dog.
Not quite perfect, though, because I'm not quite sure
how I should take this.
It thought that was a picture of a dog.
I'll avoid being offended for now, AI.
But I'm keeping my eye on you.
Deep learning was a giant leap forward in AI.
For virtual assistants to make use of it, they needed to learn
how to interact with humans.
For that, they needed real-world data of what humans say
and how they respond in a myriad of situations.
Back to Rohit.
He and his team needed to expose the prototype Alexa AI to a huge
number of different human voices, asking it a range of questions
so it could learn from them.
There was no precedent of people speaking to these devices,
there was just no data that existed, and we didn't want our
ambitions to leak in this area,
so we had to collect all this data undercover.
To keep their plan secret,
the team hired apartments and hid prototype
virtual assistants everywhere.
They then employed thousands of people with different accents
to walk around the apartments, reading questions off a script...
Play Phil Collins.
I want to hear Phil Collins.
Just give me In The Air Tonight.
..over and over and over again.
It was one of the most exciting things I've done, where even my
family didn't know what I was doing.
And how did that data look when you tried to sift through it?
For AI scientists, it was exactly the kind of data you would
like your hands on.
They fed the recordings into Alexa's cloud-based AI to find connections
in the data, so it could work out that Phil Collins, along with words
like "play" or "hear", means you want to listen to a song.
By repeatedly making similar connections over and over again,
the AI slowly trained itself to provide the best responses.
By 2014, the AI could understand questions
asked in a variety of different ways.
And Alexa was ready to be launched.
ALEXA: Hello, world.
AI brings virtual assistants to life.
But it couldn't exist without one of the greatest
technological accomplishments of the 20th century.
This is the crucial hardware that runs all the other components.
It's smaller than a postage stamp.
And yet it turns electrical energy into billions
of powerful computer calculations,
capable of operating Alexa's large AI brain.
This is the microprocessor.
You might know this as a microchip, but microprocessor
is what it's called by the computing brains of Silicon Valley.
Just a little bit of heat to move this cover off.
Whichever name you give it, getting a closer look
at the one in my virtual assistant is not exactly straightforward.
They do not make this easy.
It's got this cover on it
so that the microprocessor stays protected.
Presumably...from people like me.
SHE CHUCKLES
Oh! Yeah!
We've got it!
This...this is it!
Ooh! Was it?
SHE LAUGHS
This is it. This is genuinely where all the magic happens,
in this tiny little thing!
This is, without doubt, THE most important part of this entire thing.
This is...this is where the brain is.
The thing is about microprocessors is that at their heart, they're actually quite simple.
All they're doing is just really basic calculations.
Ones and zeros.
But they are doing it at such a level
that you are getting millions, or even billions of calculations
every single second.
Far more than your average mathematician can manage, essentially.
It's the calculating power of the microprocessor
that allows Alexa's version of a brain, its AI, to function.
Because for computers, thinking,
it's basically a lot of mathematical equations.
But how does a microprocessor,
something that on the outside,
just appears to be a lump of metal and plastic...
ALEXA: That's not nice.
..managed to make billions and billions of calculations a second?
To answer that, I need to wear some funky clothes.
Courtesy of Cambridge University's Electronic Engineering Department,
where they research, design and manufacture
some of the latest high-tech microprocessors.
There is a good reason for us to be dressed like this, isn't there?
There is. We're making things at really small-length scales.
A fraction of a human hair.
So we need to make sure the environment is free of any particulates.
That is Professor Andrew Flewitt.
When you look at a microprocessor like this,
we forget that inside is probably about five-billion transistors.
Transistors are the part of the microprocessor
that actually do the calculations.
In other words, the clever bit.
A single transistor acts as a very simple switch.
One or zero, on or off.
Linking lots of them creates a network
that can make much more complex calculations.
Your Alexa is able to understand your voice in a fraction of a second.
So it needs to be doing calculations
billions and billions of times a second.
So that means we need billions of these transistors.
But how do you squeeze that many transistors
on to a tiny microprocessor?
Well, they start with a wafer.
Which sounds delicious, but sadly, this one is extremely-pure silicon.
We coat that silicon wafer first in a polymer,
which is sensitive to UV light.
Andrew places a stencil above it,
matching the precise pattern of transistors.
It's then put in a machine that focuses UV light through the stencil,
and projects a microscopic version of that pattern on to the wafer.
They now start to etch away the surface of the wafer
in exactly the right places to create the transistors.
So the light only lands in certain regions.
Where it lands, the polymer is weakened,
and we can then wash it away
to make the pattern that we have here on our wafer.
We have to go through this process several times
to build up the complete, complex structure of the transistor.
We end up with something that looks like this.
And this pattern is transistors, is it -
just teeny, teeny, tiny ones?
It is tiny, tiny. Incredible!
This plate has 2,000 transistors,
but the latest versions can have up to 114 billion.
Holy moley!
Once complete, the wafer will be cut into 100 individual microprocessors.
A final protective plastic coating, and then we're done.
Just incredible!
Sadly, Andrew wouldn't let me take this one home to use as a coaster,
but that doesn't stop it being nothing short of a technological miracle.
One based on technology going back over 60 years.
In the 1950s, computer components were handcrafted on to circuit boards.
They contained thousands of giant transistors
and components made from dozens of different materials,
like tin, copper and lead.
This is an example of an old-school circuit board.
And you can see how each of the different components
are soldered on one by one.
Now, this is a pretty simple board,
but if you can imagine you were trying to do something much more complex,
you would end up with this gigantic board
with huge numbers of potential points of failure,
to the point where it's almost guaranteed to fail.
And that is something that they called the "tyranny of numbers".
Computers back then were hot and noisy,
and this took its toll on the many, many soldered connections.
If just one was to fail, the system wouldn't work properly.
Cue a young American engineer, Jack Kilby.
He developed an enterprising solution.
The story goes - in summer 1958,
Jack Kilby had just got a new job at a Texas firm,
and all of his colleagues were off on holiday.
But Jack hadn't accrued enough annual leave,
and so, he was stuck in the office on his own.
And while he was there, he was thinking about the tyranny of numbers.
He quickly hit upon an idea -
What if the circuit boards were made out of one main super material
that could conduct and control the flow of electricity?
Meaning that you didn't need lots of failure-prone soldered connections
between different materials.
So he went around the office and he started sticking things together
to try and make a bit of a prototype.
And he did get a prototype working. This is it here.
It was the world's first integrated circuit.
Meaning the electrical components were made of one single material.
It's basically as crude as you can get with engineering,
just stick some stuff on a plate of glass.
He used something called germanium.
There is a reason why we haven't had a big germanium revolution,
or Germanium Valley in California.
So stay with me for a second.
Because 1,500 miles away in California,
a man called Robert Noyce had come up with an integrated circuit, too.
However, his was made from silicon,
which was much more abundant and easier to mass-produce.
It's here that things get a bit sticky.
Kilby and Noyce's respective companies
both try to patent their circuits.
Each claiming that theirs was first.
A lawsuit ensues that took decades to sort out.
Eventually, they agreed to cross-license these devices,
with both men getting a claim as the inventor of the integrated circuit -
the precursor to today's microprocessors or chips.
Jack went on to have success
with the world's first hand-held calculator.
But Robert Noyce, however,
went on to co-found a little company called Intel.
OK, I'll be honest with you,
the full history of the silicon chip is incredibly technical,
but to me, it's all about just how much power
we can squeeze into something that is really eye-wateringly small.
Because without silicon, we wouldn't be able to do
all of these unimaginable things that we can do now.
The microprocessor and AI technology
are vital for your virtual assistant.
But to get the information you've asked it for,
it has to be able to communicate with the wider world.
And that is where our next component comes in.
A delicate copper wire that uses radio waves
to connect seamlessly and wirelessly to the Internet and other devices.
It's the Wi-Fi antenna!
This quite unassuming corridor is on the 30th floor
of Amazon's international headquarters in Seattle.
Behind that door is a space that's kind of like a laboratory,
but it's also probably one of the smartest apartments in the world.
It all appears to be like any normal house.
Cooker, coffee machine, sink.
Alexa? Lights on.
Ah! So this is where they bring all the new Amazon Alexa products
to be tested before they go out to the market.
So you've got Alexa-enabled washer and drier over there in the corner,
and even some slightly more unusual things,
like these weights right here. So...
Alexa?
SHE LAUGHS
There's...there's a twerking bear!
Alexa? Set weights to 20lbs.
There we go. Right.
Oh!
Yeah, probably needed to build up to that one.
Whoa! Um...
my favourite one, though, in here...is...
Alexa? Turn shower on.
Hey!
The reason why everything in this mega-connected smart home
can talk to each other,
and why Alexa can give you answers to your questions,
is down to the Wi-Fi antenna inside it.
Oh, lovely!
So satisfying.
This little bit here and here,
these are the antenna of the device.
If I ask Alexa a question,
it picks up on the vibrations in the air,
interprets what I'm saying,
and then sends out an invisible signal
across my living room, into my Wi-Fi router in the corner,
which then, in turn, by the way,
sends that signal across a cable under the Atlantic
at the speed of light
to some server in the middle of America,
which works out what the answer is.
Which then returns the signal back on those cables under the Atlantic,
out into my Wi-Fi router in my living room,
which then beams itself invisibly across my living room
back into the smart speaker to hear the response from Alexa.
All within the blink of an eye.
It's just incredible!
That last step of the process, it's all thanks to these little antennae just here,
and the Wi-Fi chip that sits just here.
You can see a little wire that connects them up together.
But how do those tiny bits of metal and the chip
send and receive the invisible information
your virtual assistant needs through the air?
It all began back in 1895 with a chap called Marconi.
And he was trying to exploit a new discovery in physics - radio waves.
Radio waves will travel long distances.
To send and receive them, he worked out that you need an antenna.
The idea was that when radio waves come into contact with it,
a tiny electrical current was created
that could be converted into, say, a sound or a picture.
Essentially, this is how the antenna in your virtual assistant
picks up Wi-Fi.
So, end of story? Not quite.
There was a problem - jamming.
Jamming is when a radio signal on a particular frequency
is drowned out by a stronger signal on that same frequency.
As the 1940s dawned and Europe was at war...
Yes, OK, we're back with war again.
..it was believed that the Germans would use jamming
to block the radio frequency the Allies used
to guide torpedoes to their target.
Giving Hitler the upper hand.
Enter stage left Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr,
known as Hollywood's most beautiful woman.
I could promise you so many things.
But she had a parallel life as a scientist.
They wouldn't think anything wrong of it.
And she'd come up with a way to prevent the Germans
from jamming Allied radio signals.
She came up with a very elegant idea.
If it's really easy to jam up one frequency,
why not split up the message
and send it across lots of different frequencies?
Her idea, now known as frequency hopping,
came to her through a chance encounter
with pianist George Antheil.
PIANO RECITAL
A bit more scene-setting for you.
Er...unfortunately, I can't actually,
I can't actually play the piano.
This is a player piano, which was a very popular thing
around the time that George and Hedy were sat together.
The story goes that it was the way the player piano worked
that gave Hedy her frequency-hopping brainwave.
Now, the way that these things work
is actually quite simple and quite clever.
The music is stored on a paper drum.
It has 88 columns, one column for each note on the piano.
And the way that it works is, if there's a hole,
it will play the note. No hole, it doesn't play the note.
And it can tell just by using air suction.
Inspired by this, Hedy's idea was to distribute
the torpedo-guidance signals in chunks.
Each signal was turned into a punched-paper sequence.
But instead of different musical notes,
it related to different frequencies.
And if the ship sent it to the torpedo in this form,
well, then the enemy wouldn't know
the unique sequence of frequency hops,
so it couldn't jam the signal.
And in 1942, they applied for a patent
for a secret communication system.
The patent was approved, by the way.
So they sent it off to the Navy,
fully expecting the Navy to just welcome it with open arms.
But actually, the Navy ignored it.
You've been avoiding me. Why?
Now, it's possible that this is a bit of a sign of the times.
That Hedy Lamarr, super famous as she was,
was famous for being a femme fatale.
And surely, a beautiful screen goddess
couldn't also be a brilliant scientist?
On top of that, her invention was quite cumbersome.
And so, it was forgotten about for decades.
Until yet another war. Well, almost.
Ships moved out to establish a quarantine line, through which...
During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962,
frequency hopping was finally installed on ships
to prevent Russian signal-jamming.
The democracies had served notice on the Russians that any
aggressive threat in the Western Hemisphere would not be tolerated.
So, how did we get from Hedy's frequency hopping
to your virtual assistant's Wi-Fi capabilities?
Cut to the early 1970s.
On the tropical islands of Hawaii,
far more tranquil than all that war footage...
..engineers at the university are trying to connect up
the computers in their campuses.
But there is a problem.
The campuses are spread across several islands,
linked up with expensive and error-prone cabling.
And so, they use radio signals sent between antennae and ALOHAnet.
A pioneering wireless computer network is born.
In Hawaii? Yes indeed.
Good job it wasn't invented in Germany.
GUTEN-TAGnet doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
But as Wi-Fi took off,
the narrow range of radio frequencies used became crowded,
and signals from all of the computers began to interfere with each other.
In 1997, 55 years after she'd had the idea,
Hedy's frequency-hopping technique would become the foundation
to solving that problem.
I've loved you since before I knew the meaning of the word!
By spreading the signal between multiple frequencies
to avoid getting clogged up on any one wavelength,
modern Wi-Fi usage became possible.
Today, we have billions of devices,
all communicating with the Internet via their Wi-Fi antennas.
And that is a big deal for Alexa and its multi-device smart home.
We have over 40 devices in here, and they constantly change.
That is Marja Koopmans, director of Amazon Smart Home.
She is responsible for making Alexa connect via Wi-Fi.
We're quite excited at how far we've come along.
Over 140,000 different types of devices
are able to connect with Alexa.
ALEXA: ..start vacuuming.
But does having so many of our smart devices
controlled from a single source, the virtual assistant,
invite security problems like hacking?
Alexa, follow me.
ALEXA: Following is now on.
Marja doesn't seem to think so.
Things like privacy and security
are built in from the get-go.
We have multiple technology layers in place
to safeguard for that type of scenario.
Including encrypted two-ways.
GIGGLING
With wireless connectivity,
the virtual assistant no longer needs to be static.
Wheels will let it move and cameras will make it see.
This is the future.
The future of Alexa is not just the future of Alexa,
it's the future of robots.
That's Ken Washington, head of Consumer Robotics.
We've put Alexa into a robot.
OK, let me see him, let me see him.
All right, cool. Let's take a look.
Astro? Come here.
Named Astro...
"I'm coming." Hello, Astro!
..this is Amazon's first foray into the world of domestic robots.
That is actually quite sweet.
Check out what he looks like. The eyes can convey.
It can convey, sadness, happiness, joy and, you know, anger.
Not sure I'd want an angry robot in my house.
However, Astro does have some other handy features.
So, Astro?
Act like a horse.
ASTRO WHINNIES AND HANNAH LAUGHS
That's really cute!
In addition to being cute, it can also be quite useful.
You can use Astro to monitor your home when you're not home.
All through an app on your phone and Astro's onboard camera.
And with this periscope,
I check on my doors
to make sure that the doors are closed and that they're locked.
And then, the obvious question is, stairs?
You know, it doesn't do stairs.
Astro is a single-floor robot.
Giving our voice assistance a body is really the future of this?
In my head, every home's going to have at least one robot.
They're going to help you live safer lives.
This is just the beginning.
Unless you've got stairs, that is.
Whether you think of your virtual assistant as being like
a trusted family member,
or you worry about it being the ears of a giant corporation,
there is no doubt that they are having an impact.
I think that it demonstrates just how quickly ungrateful
we become about new technology.
I am as guilty as the next person
of getting cross with my voice assistant
when it doesn't do exactly what I want the first time.
But maybe most importantly of all,
I think that voice assistants are an example
of something that we are seeing happen
where it's the technology that leads the way.
And it's only later that society asks the question
of whether it's something that we really want in our lives.
And that, I think, is a trend
that we're going to have to deal with a lot more in future.
Next time, it's the electric car.
I will find out how frogs and Frankenstein...
Hello. Look at you!
..led to Elon Musk's supercars.
Oh, my God!
Why 19th-century meat-packing almost derailed the EV revolution.
They're not very good escape vehicles.
And how not to drive a multimillion-dollar
prototype car of the future.
Oh, God! Oh, BLEEP! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!
To explore the interesting dilemmas
behind some familiar pieces of technology
and to hear some of my own thoughts, go to...
..and follow the links to the Open University.