The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet

This Author Meets Critics conversation focuses on Joseph Turow's book The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet (Yale University Press, 2021). Turow met with marketing and advertising specialists to discuss the following topics: the voice intelligence industry; the concepts of seductive surveillance, spiral of personalization, habituation, and resignation; surveillance capitalism; what voice data reveal and don't reveal about people; the institutionalization of voice enabled technologies; inaccurate predictions based on biometric data; investigating patent filings to understand how marketers imagine their work and the future; how voice technologies empower and disempower; opt-in personalization; building awareness of voice technologies; obscurity around the voice intelligence industry's business model; data sharing; why female voices are used frequently in voice-enabled technologies; challenges of doing industry-based research; companies' hesitancy to share data and collaborate on voice-related projects; the responsibility of voice scientists to intervene in the use of their research by marketers; and advice for readers of the book.