Silicon Valley is beta testing a new service: speaking human. Like any early iteration of a tech product, it is imperfect. But if the initial tests are promising, it may yet lead to rapid reiteration and a full rollout.

What strikes the occasional visitor to Silicon Valley is the change of rhetoric that has swept across the tech industry over the past year. A new word cloud seems to be hovering over Palo Alto including the terms: responsibility, privacy, inequality and bias.

It would be alarming if that were not the case, given the public bashing that Big Tech has recently received. Sexual harassment, democracy distortion, algorithmic discrimination and privacy erosion are just some of the charges that have been levelled against Silicon Valley of late.