Agree, there's definitely a risk for uncanny valley in voice assistants around tone. Emotion in particular is an area where I think we won't have sophisticated

Agree, there's definitely a risk for uncanny valley in voice assistants around tone. Emotion in particular is an area where I think we won't have sophisticated enough systems to address for some time, which means it's mostly something that makes things unintentionally worse. A few of these downsides include: 1. tone has a different valence than what the subject matter requires ('Sure thing! The funeral home number is...'), which reminds you of and amplifies negative feelings 2. tone is used to get something from you, which makes you feel manipulated 3. tone is uniformly applied, which through repeat exposure makes the world feel false Totally agree that randomized prosody would help aid in making assistants more natural; tempo and rhythm don't have as much emotional weight. I'm not sure explicit markup is the right way to approach the problem, given its lack of understanding of user context and state of mind, and the likelihood developers execute poorly. It feels like a solution at the wrong level of abstraction... getting in sync with a user's emotions is a pretty high bar.