Answer Machine (2026)
An interactive answer machine that plays a series of uncanny voicemails generated by randomised predictive phone message texts.
I heard that people were getting weird suggestions from their predictive text on their phones after an update.
It reminded me of a few years back when people were writing things like “In 2019 I’ll…” and then spamming the three suggestion buttons to generate a personalised story.
It made me wonder what kind of text it would produce without any personal data to base it on: what the underlying, basic, averaged-out messages would be like. The default state of mind of the predictive text person. Who’s in there?
On a phone I reset predictive text and the keyboard to factory defaults so it would have nothing to work from. Then I worked out the 27 possible permutations of the 3 buttons, looping through them and generating text until it reached a natural sentence ending at the end of a set of three.
So what kind of things are in the mind of this collective person? What’s the cosmic background radiation-type humanity that comes out? There’s a lot about what people want. And what they don’t want. There’s a lot of logistics. Home. Work. Homework. Cars. Health concerns. A lot of worry. A lot of “I don’t know” – lots of uncertainty. A lot of trying to resolve situations. A lot of love.
As written text it was too easy to see the messages as artificial, so I recorded them and put them into this old answer machine. To put the humanity back in to where it was stripped out.
The overwhelming feeling is of someone grasping with the idea of meaning.
Listening to them one after another, moments of darkness and light pop up and disappear very quickly. They can’t sustain themselves. Feeling moments of empathy with the voice – feeling genuinely sad for it, and then its humanity is undone when it reveals itself quickly to be bluffing.
Occasionally, during a normal day, I hear myself speaking in the voice of the thing. Especially if I’m a bit confused or tired. Hearing hints of that person coming out of me and thinking that I’m channelling it.
A note about the method for generating the messages:
There are 11 unique number combinations which aren’t repeated in the way that e.g. 112 is the same as 211 in terms of the order of the button presses when you keep cycling through the sequence.
However, 112 generates a very different message from 211 because of the different starting word, which sends it off in a different direction, in terms of meaning. And the order that you travel through the set of 27 affects it a lot too. I ended up making one version by resetting the phone keyboard between each message, looking for the “truest” version. In the end I chose text for each of the 27 combinations across the 6 versions (162 messages) I’d made by changing the order in which the messages were generated. I decided they’re all “true” in different ways.
