<< disembodied voice >>

FOAF is a project to allow people to describe, in a computer-readable fashion, their friends and the relationships between them. "the disembodied voice of your friend" takes these files and crawls them to discover the relationships between people. Speech synthesis software speaks these relationships, e.g., "My name is Bob and my friends are Alice, Suzy, Bill, and John." The speech software then follows the link to one of Bob's friends and reads the friend's friends. If, for example, Bob lists Bill as a friend, but Bill doesn't list Bob as a friend, the voice gets agitated when Bob speaks, showing Bob's displeasure in the fact that Bill doesn't list him as a friend.

"the disembodied voice of your friend" highlights the absurdity of listing your social network in a computer-readable form. This absurdity is due to the complexity of social networks being described as simple directed graphs.

FOAF data files, speech synthesis software, custom controller software