Speak
Speak: a novel
Spanning geography and time, Speak takes us from a Puritan girl, Mary, crossing the Atlantic in the 17th century to Alan Turing’s conviction in the 1950s to a Silicon Valley Wunderkind imprisoned in 2040 for creating illegally lifelike dolls. From a pilgrim girl writing her diary to a traumatised young girl exchanging messages with a software program, all these lives have shaped and changed a single artificial intelligence—MARY3. In Speak, she tells you their story, and her own. It the last story she will ever tell, spoken both in celebration and in warning.
Louisa Hall: the author
Louisa Hall grew up in Philadelphia. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Iowa. She is the author of the novels Trinity, Speak and The Carriage House, and her poems have been published in The New Republic, Southwest Review, and other journals.
Speak: An overview
In an interview at Librairie Mollat, Louisa Hall describes her novel, Speak, discusses the characters and her inspiration for writing the novel.
KCRW interviews Louisa Hall
In Hall's future, artificial intelligence has been programmed with stories of passion, love and loss. Will computers become better than humans at communicating depth? We discuss the human need to communicate through the emotional truth of the stories we tell.
The Voices
Each of the following characters is attempting to communicate across gaps—to estranged spouses, lost friends, future readers, or a computer program that may or may not understand them.
In dazzling and electrifying prose, Louisa Hall explores how the chasm between computer and human—shrinking rapidly with today’s technological advances—echoes the gaps that exist between ordinary people.
Though each speaks from a distinct place and moment in time, all six characters share the need to express themselves while simultaneously wondering if they will ever be heard, or understood.
Click on the character's name below to discover more information.
A babybot, a child's toy classified as excessively lifelike. They have been banned and marked for disposal.
A former Silicon Valley Wunderkind is imprisoned for creating illegally lifelike dolls.
An isolated and traumatized young girl exchanges messages with an intelligent software program.
Jewish refugee and professor of computer science struggles to reconnect with his increasingly detached wife.
Alan Turing, the renowned mathematician and code breaker, writes letters to his best friend’s mother.
This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert meet humans and robots who are trying to connect, and blur the line.
We begin with a love story--from a man who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot on an online dating site. Then, we encounter a robot therapist whose inventor became so unnerved by its success that he pulled the plug. And we talk to the man who coded Cleverbot, a software program that learns from every new line of conversation it receives...and that's chatting with more than 3 million humans each month. Then, five intrepid kids help us test a hypothesis about a toy designed to push our buttons, and play on our human empathy. And we meet a robot built to be so sentient that its creators hope it will one day have a consciousness, and a life, all its own.