My grandmother kept a slim etiquette manual on the shelf beside her telephone, as if the device itself might require supervision. I thought of that book recently while arguing, politely at first, with the voice assistant in a rented car outside Lyon. It had interrupted me four times in ten minutes, each time to offer something I had not requested. It was not stupid, exactly. It was simply rude, in the way a very clever child can be rude.
For most of the past decade, the conversation about artificial intelligence has been a conversation about capability. Could the machine write the essay, pass the exam, draft the contract, paint the picture? Those questions have largely been answered, and the answers are mostly yes. What remains, and what increasingly determines whether we tolerate these systems in our homes, is a quieter and more ancient question. Does the thing know how to behave?
Imogen Achterberg believes it can learn. She runs Parlour, a small studio in Clerkenwell that describes its work, only half in jest, as etiquette engineering. Her clients are companies building assistants for hotels, private banks and carmakers, sectors where a single graceless sentence can undo years of careful reputation. Parlour writes the rules that govern when a machine should speak, when it should wait, and when it should say nothing at all.
The art of the pause
Much of the work, Achterberg explains, concerns timing rather than language. A good butler, she likes to say, is defined by what he notices and chooses not to mention. Her team studies transcripts of skilled concierges and sommeliers, mapping the moments where a human professional would hesitate, lower their voice or simply let a silence stand. Those pauses are then translated into behavioural rules that sit beneath the language model like a set of good habits.
Intelligence is cheap now. What people will pay for is discretion, the sense that the machine understands the room it is in. — Imogen Achterberg
There is something faintly absurd about all this, and Achterberg is the first to admit it. We are teaching software the social graces that many people never quite master themselves. Yet the absurdity reveals something real. Manners were never really about forks and fish knives. They were a technology for living closely with others, a set of protocols for reducing friction between people who had to share space. Machines now share that space with us.
The risk, of course, is that courtesy becomes another surface for manipulation. A machine that apologises beautifully may be harder to argue with, and a system trained to seem deferential can still be pursuing someone else's interests. Achterberg takes the point seriously. Parlour's guidelines forbid flattery, require assistants to disclose when they are selling something, and insist that any system must be able to admit plainly that it does not know.
I left our conversation oddly moved. Perhaps the most luxurious thing a machine can offer is not speed or omniscience but restraint, the sense of being attended to without being crowded. My grandmother would have understood that instinctively. Her manual, I remember now, devoted an entire chapter to the telephone, and its final instruction was simple enough to fit on a card. Speak only when you have something worth saying, and then say it kindly.
