"Tell me a joke," is the first thing I say to check whether a voice assistant is listening -- which I do a lot in the CNET Smart Home. Voice assistants can do all sorts of things, from controlling your lights to booking flights. And yet the first impulse so many of us have is to look for that glimmer of humanity in them. We ask for jokes, we ask what their favorite books are, we ask how they want to be remembered after they die -- nonsensical questions, but ones for which programmers have dutifully provided answers, because they know we will ask them.
