Abstract: This article reconstructs the overlooked history of early “talking terminals”—telephone-linked connections that, starting around 1960, generated simple responses to millions of callers. Drawing on corporate archives, technical reports, and popular media, it shows how postwar American banks, stock exchanges, and service firms adopted touch-tone phones and concatenated computer voices to automate clerical tasks once performed by women. These talking terminals both displaced and reinscribed pink-collar labor, normalizing a docile, efficient vocal persona that humanized machines while mechanizing workers. By tracing this lineage, the article situates today’s digital assistants within a longer gendered continuum of telecommunications, automation, and consumer capitalism.
Benjamin Lindquist (Thu,) studied this question.