Text 1: My house is cleverer than me, by Neil Haverford

An original contemporary magazine column.

A month ago, a technology company offered to turn our ordinary terraced house into a ‘smart home’ for free, in exchange for my honest opinion. Here it is.

We now have a voice assistant in every room. It switches on the lights, sets the heating, reads out the weather and plays music when asked. It also, it turns out, plays music when not asked, because it thinks it has heard its name. On the first night it woke us at three in the morning with a burst of jazz, apparently in response to my wife sneezing.

There is a doorbell with a camera, which sends a video to my phone whenever anything moves on the doorstep. Anything. In the first week it sent me forty-one videos of next door’s cat, two of a crisp packet and one, at two in the morning, of a slug. There is also a camera inside the fridge, so that I can check from the supermarket whether we need milk. I have never once remembered to look.

My mother-in-law refuses to speak to any of it. ‘I’m not talking to a box,’ she says, and turns the lights on with the switch, as she has done for seventy years.

And yet. The heating, which now learns when we are out and turns itself down, has cut our gas bill by almost a fifth. My son, who is dyslexic, uses the voice assistant to spell words for his homework and has stopped dreading it. When I come home late, the hall light comes on before I have found my keys, and I find, to my surprise, that I like it.

Would I keep it? Probably. But every night before bed I unplug the speaker in our bedroom. It is not that I think anyone is listening. It is just that I am no longer completely sure that nobody is.

Text 2: A letter about the gas stove, by Charlotte Brindley

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1886, a woman tells her sister about the gas cooking stove newly fitted in her kitchen.

My dearest Kate, You will laugh, but I must tell you that we are become quite modern. On Monday two men from the Gas Company came and fixed a gas cooking stove in the kitchen, in the place where the old range used to roar and smoke, and Edward is now able to tell everyone at his club that his dinner is cooked by science.

Mrs Hobbs did not take it well. She stood in the doorway with her arms folded all the while the men were at work, and when they had gone she told me plainly that she had cooked for gentlefolk for thirty years by a proper fire and did not intend to be blown up at her time of life. For two days she would not go near it, and we dined on cold mutton.

On Wednesday I lit it myself, with a taper, while she watched from behind the scullery door. Nothing exploded. A neat ring of blue flame sprang up, with no smoke and no smut and no waiting, and the kettle boiled in eight minutes. Mrs Hobbs came a little nearer. By Thursday she was roasting a leg of lamb, and she owned, in a low voice, that it was done more evenly than ever the range had done it.

There are drawbacks. Edward sniffs about the kitchen like a terrier, convinced that he smells gas, and is already anxious about the first quarter’s account. The children have been forbidden on pain of death to touch the taps. Mrs Parfitt next door says that food cooked by gas tastes of the gasworks, though she has never eaten any.

But no coals to carry up from the cellar, Kate, no grate to black every morning, no kitchen like a furnace in August! Mrs Hobbs now defends the stove against all comers, and spoke very sharply to Mrs Parfitt’s cook over the garden wall on Friday.

Your affectionate sister, Charlotte

Both of these texts are about new technology in the home.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the new technology and people’s reactions to it
• how the writers present these reactions

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