Otto is the conversational assistant resident in private ground vehicles, and by extension the name most residents use for the household system that manages a home’s lighting, doors, and displays. The name is an elision of auto, and has long since passed from brand to common noun: one speaks to Otto much as one speaks to a room.

Vehicle use#

A private carriage is driverless and windowless in the structural sense; its exterior and interior surfaces are display. Passengers address Otto to set the vehicle’s appearance, and children’s use of this is a recognized domestic nuisance — a carriage may be asked to be a plane, a train, or a Roman chariot in the space of a minute, and the request can be countermanded by any other passenger.

Otto arbitrates such disputes by deferring to the household’s own hierarchy rather than by any rule of its own. A parent’s instruction to turn the windows off is understood both as a command and as a ruling that the children are no longer permitted to change the setting, and Otto enforces the second part without being asked. Residents describe this ability to hear a tone as the assistant’s single most useful feature and its most unnerving one.

Household use#

In the home, Otto handles the tasks that on Earth would be distributed across a dozen unrelated systems: lights, locks, climate, the sky rendered on interior ceilings, and the routing of calls. Holographic telepresence is available for calls but is not universally liked — a correspondent rendered at full fidelity in a domestic room is commonly said to look as though they are standing in a magic box, and many residents prefer flat display for family conversation.