In the 2013 film Her, a lonely, soon-to-be divorced Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) downloads a new AI-powered operating system that its creator, Elements Software, advertises as “an intuitive entity that listens to you, understands you and knows you”.
It is exactly what the despondent Twombly is craving. Settling in front of his home computer, he selects a female voice for his digital assistant and is immediately greeted by a bubbly alto tinged with an irresistible rasp. “Hello, I’m here,” says Samantha, voiced by the actress Scarlett Johansson. He is smitten, and the two soon begin a romantic relationship.
Samantha’s voice appears to have also left a deep impression on Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, an $86bn artificial intelligence start-up whose ambitions seem to be every bit as lofty as those of the fictional Elements Software.