Sometime
in the mid-2000s, I was a freelance web developer in Philadelphia with
some pretty crappy health insurance. I started having occasional heart
palpitations, like skipped heart beats. My doctor said it was probably
not serious, but she could do tests to rule out very unlikely potential
complications for about $1,000. That seemed pretty expensive to rent a
portable EKG for a single day, so I googled around for some schematics.
Turned out you could build a basic three-lead EKG with about $5 worth of
Radio Shack parts (I no longer have the exact schematic, but something like this).
I didn’t really understand what the circuit did, but I followed the
directions and soldered it together on some protoboard, connected a 9V
battery, and used three pennies as electrodes that I taped to my chest. I
hooked the output of the device to my laptop’s line in and pressed ‘record’.
screenshot of my heartbeat in Audacity
Audacity
displayed the heartbeat signal live as it recorded. Sure enough, I was
having pretty common/harmless Premature Ventricular Contractions.
There’s one on the right side of the screenshot above.
Calling
the 1/8th inch connectors you’d find on pretty much every piece of
consumer electronics until recently “audio jacks” does them a
disservice. It’s like calling your car a “grocery machine”. Headphone
and microphone ports are, at their most basic, tools for reading and
producing voltages precisely and rapidly over time.
My
homemade EKG is a voltage converter. Electrodes attached to points
around my heart measure tiny differences in voltage produced by signals
that keep it beating. Those measured signals are amplified to about plus
or minus 2 volts. That new voltage travels through an audio cable to
the “Line In” on my sound card.
Sound cards happen to carry sound most of the time, but they are perfectly happy measuring any AC
voltage from -2 to +2 volts at 48,000 times per second with 16 bits of
accuracy. Put another way, your microphone jack measures the voltage on a
wire (two wires for stereo) every 0.2 milliseconds, and records it as a
value between 0 and 65,535. Your headphone jack does the opposite, by applying a voltage between -2 and +2 to a wire every 0.2 milliseconds, it creates a sound.
To
any headphone jack, all audio is raw in the sense that it exists as a
series of voltages that ultimately began as measurements by some tool,
like a microphone or an electric guitar pickup or an EKG. There is no
encryption or rights management, no special encoding or secret keys.
It’s just data in the shape of the sound itself, as a record of voltages
over time. When you play back a sound file, you feed that record of
voltages to your headphone jack. It applies those voltages to, say, the
coil in your speaker, which then pushes or pulls against a permanent
magnet to move the air in the same way it originally moved the
microphone whenever the sound was recorded.
Smartphone manufacturers are broadly eliminating headphone jacks
going forward, replacing them with wireless headphones or BlueTooth.
We’re going to all lose touch with something, and to me it feels like
something important.
The
series of voltages a headphone jack creates is immediately
understandable and usable with the most basic tools. If you coil up some
copper, and put a magnet in the middle, and then hook each side of the
coil up to your phone’s headphone jack, it would make sounds.
They would not be pleasant or loud, but they would be tangible and
human-scale and understandable. It’s a part of your phone that can read
and produce electrical vibrations.
Without that port, we will forever be beholden to device drivers
between our sounds and our speakers. We’ll lose reliable access to an
analog voltage we could use to drive any magnetic coil on earth, any
pair of headphones. Instead, we’ll have to pay a toll, either through
dongles or wireless headphones. It will be the end of a common interface
for sound transfer that survived more or less unchanged for a century,
the end of plugging your iPod into any stereo bought since WWII.
Entrepreneurs
and engineers will lose access to a nearly universal, license-free I/O
port. Independent headphone manufacturers will be forced into a
dongle-bound second-class citizenry. Companies like Square — which made
brilliant use of the headphone/microphone jack to produce credit card
readers that are cheap enough to just give away for free — will be hit with extra licensing fees.
Because
a voltage is just a voltage. Beyond an input range, nobody can define
what you do with it. In the case of the Square magstripe reader, it is
powered by the energy generally used to drive speakers (harvesting the
energy of a sine wave being played over the headphones), and it
transmits data to the microphone input.
There’s also the HiJack project,
which makes this whole repurposing process open source and general
purpose. They provide circuits that cost less than $3 to build that can
harvest 7mW of power from a sound playing out of an iPhone’s headphone
jack. Because you have raw access to some hardware that reads and writes
voltages, you can layer an API on top of it to do anything you want,
and it’s not licensable or limited by outside interests, just some
reasonably basic analog electronics.
I don’t know exactly how
losing direct access to our signals will harm us, but doesn’t it feel
like it’s going to somehow? Like we may get so far removed from how our
devices work, by licenses and DRM, dongles and adapters that we no
longer even want to understand them? There’s beauty
in the transformation of sound waves to electricity through a
microphone, and then from electricity back to sound again through a
speaker coil. It is pleasant to understand. Compare that to
understanding, say, the latest BlueTooth API. One’s an arbitrary and
fleeting manmade abstraction, the other a mysterious and dazzlingly convenient property of the natural world.
So,
if you’re like me and you like headphone jacks, what can you do? Well,
you could only buy phones that have them, which I think you’ll be able
to do for a couple years. Vote with your dollar!
You
can also tell companies that are getting rid of headphone jacks that
you don’t like it. That your mother did not raise a fool. That aside
from maybe water-resistance,
there’s not a single good reason you can think of to give up your
headphone jack. Tell them you see what they’re up to, and you don’t like it.
You can say this part slightly deeper, through gritted teeth, if you
get to say it aloud. Or, just italicize it so they know you are serious.
An overview of the issues around voice technology and top line considerations for brand owners.
Sony’s LF-S50G speaker with Google Assistant. Image via Sony.
Summary
Voice
based technology is going to have a huge impact on many sectors, with
50% of all search forecast to be voice-based within just two years. The
rate of uptake is likely to vary based on age, geography and
literacy — but some markets and platforms already have high penetration,
while globally 10% of search is already voice based.
There
will be new winners and losers in this space, and incumbent brands will
need to look at the impact of losing control of the consumer
conversation during the purchase process, making it harder to stand out
against their competition.
However,
voice interfaces give an unprecedented opportunity for brands to
interact with consumers in an extremely powerful new way, and few brands
have taken advantage of this yet. Current widely-available
functionality is limited in scope and very utility-focused; there are
opportunities to develop innovative content and experiences as well as
whole new services.
The
brands that rise to the occasion are in a good position to increase
their market share. Additionally, there are many tools available
allowing easy experimentation with voice for minimal investment.
Our
recommendation is to start a low investment program of service design
and Tone of Voice experimentation as soon as possible — possibly tied in
to campaign activity — in order to prepare your brand to take advantage
of opportunities that this technology reveals.
Introduction
What do we mean by ‘Voice’?
In
the context of this article, we mean ‘talking out loud to automated
services’. This covers everything from interactive fiction to utilities,
available on bespoke hardware devices, within apps on phones and in the
cloud, either accessed via a branded product or one of the major
players’ virtual assistants.
A lot of the hype around voice revolves around the uptake of smart speakers (75% of US households are projected to own one by 2020),
and the ‘voice assistants’ that come with them. Several of these
assistants now allow direct third party integration, a bit like apps on a
smartphone.
In
addition, it’s important to note that these and other voice assistants
are available on other hardware — often phones and tablets, via apps and
deep OS integrations, but also bespoke hardware devices and even
websites.
In
many respects the technologies underlying voice and bots are the
same — but the ecosystems and impact are different enough to have made
voice very much its own area.
Is voice just hype?
No.
It’s true that there is a lot of hype about voice, and that it looks
similar to 3D printing and other ‘technologies that will change the way
we live’, but interacting with computers via voice interfaces is here to
stay.
Perhaps more interestingly, there are some reasons behind those statistics that might be telling.
It’s often said in technology circles that the majority of next billion people due to get online
for the first time will be poorly educated and likely illiterate, as
‘underdeveloped’ nations start to get internet access. For this
demographic video and voice will be paramount — and voice may be the
only two-way medium available to them.
Additionally,
the iPad effect revealed how even very young children could interact
with a touchscreen while struggling with a mouse; voice interaction is
even faster and more intuitive (once someone can talk) and will
undoubtedly be the primary interaction method for some functions within a
few years.
It’s
also worth considering the stakes involved, especially for Google and
Amazon, the biggest players in ad revenue and organic product discovery
respectively. Amazon’s aggressive move into voice will already be having
a noticeable effect on Google’s bottom line by moving search away from
the web and Google ads’ reach— which explains why the latter is working
so hard to make a success of its own Assistant.
To
their advantage Google can leverage their existing 2.5Bn Android
devices in the wild. With numbers that big and uptake gaining traction
you can understand the predicted total of 7.5Bn installed voice assistants in operation by 2021.
Concerns about privacy and security do slow adoption in some respects, which we explore later in this article.
A
common argument against voice is the social oddness or ‘embarrassment
factor’ of talking out loud to a device, especially in a public place
(and especially by older people — by which we mean anyone over 20
really). BBH’s view on this is that these norms are fast to change; for
example a decade ago it was unthinkable to put a phone on a dinner table
in most situations; these days it can be a sign of giving undivided
attention (depending on nuance), or it can even be acceptable to answer a
call or write a text during a meal in some circumstances.
Overview
Voice is quickly carving a space in the overall mix of technological touchpoints for products and services.
In many ways, this is not surprising; using our voices to communicate is three times faster, and significantly easier
than typing. It’s so natural that it takes only 30 minutes for users to
relax with this entirely new interface, despite it bringing a freight
of new social norms.
There
are also contexts in which voice simply beats non-voice input methods;
with wet or full hands (cooking, showering), with eyes being used for
something else (driving) or almost anything for those of us whose use of
hands or eyes may be limited.
Cooking is an obvious example of when it’s preferable to be hands free. Image via saga.co.uk
While
voice is unlikely to completely replace text in the foreseeable future,
it will undoubtedly have a big impact in many technology-related
fields, notably including e-commerce and search.
A brief history of voice
Automated
voice-based interfaces have been around for decades now although their
most influential exposure has been on customer service phone lines. Most
of the systems involved have suffered from a variety of problems, from
poor voice recognition to complex ecosystems.
Five years ago industry leading voice recognition was only at around 75% accuracy;
recent advances in machine learning techniques, systems and hardware
have increased the rate of the best systems to around 95–97%.
Approaching
and crossing this cognitive threshold has been the single biggest
factor in the current boom. Humans recognise spoken words with around
95% accuracy, and use context to error correct. Any automated system
with a lower recognition accuracy feels frustrating to most users and
isn’t therefore commercially viable.
Related
developments in machine learning approaches to intent derivation
(explained later in this article) are also a huge contributing factor.
Commercial systems for this functionality crossed a similar threshold a
couple of years ago and were responsible for the boom in bots; voice is
really just bots without text.
Bots
themselves have also been around for decades, but the ability to
process natural language rather than simply recognising keywords has led
to dialogue-based interactions, which in turn powered the recent
explosion in platforms and services.
Assistants
Pre-eminent
in the current voice technology landscape is the rise of virtual
automated assistants. Although Siri (and other less well known
alternatives) have been available for years, the rise of Alexa and
Google Assistant in particular heralds a wider platform approach.
The
new assistants promote whole ecosystems and function across a range of
devices; Alexa can control your lights, tell you what your meetings are
for the day, and help you cook a recipe. These provide opportunities for
brands and new entrants alike to participate in the voice experience.
Effect on markets
A
new, widely used mechanism for online commerce is always going to be
hugely disruptive, and it’s currently too early to know in detail what
all the effects of voice will be for brands.
Three
of the biggest factors to take into account are firstly that many
interactions will take place entirely on platform, reducing or removing
the opportunity for search marketing. Secondly the fact that
dialogue-based interactions don’t support lists of items well means that
assistants will generally try to recommend a single item rather than
present options to the user, and lastly that the entire purchase process
will, in many cases, take place with no visual stimulus whatever.
All
of these factors are currently receiving a lot of attention but it’s
safe to say that the effect on (especially FMCG) brands is going to be
enormous, especially when combined with other factors like Amazon’s
current online dominance as both marketplace and own-brand provider.
Two strategies that are currently being discussed
as possible ways to approach these new challenges are either to market
to the platforms (as in, try to ensure that Amazon, Google etc.
recommend your product to users), and/or to try to drastically increase
brand recognition so that users ask for your product by name rather than
the product category. Examples would be the way the British use
‘Hoover’ interchangeably with ‘vacuum cleaner’ or Americans using
‘Xerox’ meaning ‘to photocopy’.
Role vs other touchpoints
Over
the next few years many brands will create a presence on voice
platforms. This could take any form, from services providing utilities
or reducing the burden on customer services, to communications and
campaign entertainment.
Due
to the conversational nature of voice interfaces, the lack of a
guaranteed visual aspect and the role of context in sensitive
communications, few or no brands will rely on voice alone; it won’t
replace social, TV, print and online but rather complement these
platforms.
It’s
also worth noting that a small but significant part of any brand’s
audience won’t be able to speak or hear; for them voice only interfaces
are not accessible (although platforms such as Google Assistant also
have visual interfaces).
Branding and voice
In
theory voice technology gives brands an unprecedented opportunity to
connect with consumers in a personal, even intimate way; of all the
potential brand touchpoints, none have the potential for deep personal
connection at scale that voice does.
At
the same time, the existing assistant platforms all pose serious
questions for brands looking to achieve an emotional connection to some
extent. Google Assistant provides the richest platform opportunity for
brands, but is still at one remove from ‘native’ functionality, while
Alexa imposes extra limitations on brands.
Having
said that, voice technology does represent an entirely new channel with
some compelling brand characteristics, and despite the drawbacks may
represent an important opportunity to increase brand recognition.
We’re all hardwired to see faces around us—and to make emotional connections when we talk. Image via adme.ru
Human-like characteristics
It
is well established that people assign human characteristics to all
their interactions, but this phenomenon is especially powerful with
spoken conversations. People develop feelings for voice agents; over a third of regular users wish their assistant were human and 1 in 4 have fantasised about their assistant.
Voice-based
services, for the first time, allow brands to entirely construct the
characteristics of the entity that represents them. The process is both
similar to and more in depth than choosing a brand spokesperson; it’s
important to think about all the various aspects of the voice that
represents the brand or service.
Examples
of factors worth considering when designing a voice interface include
the gender, ethnicity and age of the (virtual) speaker, as well as their
accent. It may be possible to have multiple different voices, but that
raises the question of how to choose which to use — perhaps by service
offered or (if known) by customer origin or some other data points.
Another
interesting factor is the virtual persona’s relationship to both the
user and the brand; is the agent like a host? An advisor? Perhaps a
family member? Does it represent the brand itself? Or does it talk about
the brand in the third person? Does it say things like “I’ll just check
that for you”, implying access to the brand’s core services that’s
distinct from the agent itself?
There
are of course technical considerations to take into account; depending
on the service you create and the platform it lives on it may not be
possible to create a bespoke voice at all, or there may be limits on the
customisation possible. This is explored in more detail below.
In
some cases, it may even be possible to explore factors that are richer
still; such as the timbre of the voice and ‘soft’ aspects like the
warmth that the speech is delivered with.
Lastly,
it’s worth noting that voice bots have two way conversations with
individual users that are entirely brand mediated; there is no human in
the conversation who may be having a bad day or be feeling tired.
Tone of Voice in bot conversations
Tone
of Voice documents and editorial guides are generally written to
support broadcast media; even as they have become more detailed to
inform social media posting, guides often focus on crafted headline
messages.
Conversational interfaces push the bounds of those documents further than ever before, for a few reasons.
Firstly,
voice agents will typically play a role that is closer to the pure
brand world than either sales or support; entertainment and other
marketing activities make the role of an agent often closer to a social
media presence than a real human, but with a human-like conversational
touchpoint.
Secondly,
both bots and voice agents have two way conversations with customers.
In a sense this is no different than sales or customer service (human)
agents, but psychologically speaking those conversations are with a
human first and a brand representative second.
In
a conversation with a customer services representative, for example,
any perceptions the consumer has about the brand are to some extent
separate from the perceptions about the human they are interacting with.
Lastly,
it’s critical to note that users will feel empowered to test the
boundaries of an automated agent’s conversation more than they would a
human, and will naturally test and experiment.
Expect
users to ask searching questions about the brand’s competitors or the
latest less-than-ideal press coverage. If users are comfortable with the
agent, expect them to ask questions unrelated to your service, or even
to talk about their feelings and wishes. Even in the normal course of
events, voice interactions will yield some unusual and new situations
for brands. For example, this commenter on a New York Times article was interrupted mid sentence, causing a brief stir and a lot of amusement.
How
voice agents deal with the wide range of new input comes down not only
to the information the agent can respond to, but more importantly the
way in which it responds. To some extent this is the realm of UX
writing, but hugely important in this is the brand voice.
As
an example, if you ask Google Assitant what it thinks of Siri (many
users’ first question), it might reply “You know Siri too?! What a small
world — hope they’re doing well”.
Service design for voice
Whether
based in utility, entertainment, or something else, some core
considerations come into play when building a voice-based service. It’s
not uncommon for these factors to lead to entirely new services being
built for brands.
Obviously
it’s important to consider the impact that not having a screen will
have on the experience. As an example, lists of results are notoriously
bad over a voice interface; as an experiment read the first page of a
Google search results out loud. This means that experiences tend to be
more “guided” and rely less on the user to select an option — although
there are also lots of other implications.
With
that in mind, it’s also good to note that increasingly voice platform
users may have screens that both they and the assistant can access;
either built into the device (like with Echo Show) or via smartphone or
ecosystem-wide screens such as with the Google Assistant. While these
screens can’t be counted upon, they can be used to enrich experiences
where available.
Another
important factor is the conversational nature of the interface; this
has a huge impact on the detail of the service design but can also mean
selecting services with a high ratio of content to choices, or at least
where a linear journey through the decision matrix would make sense.
Interfaces of this sort are often hugely advantageous for complex
processes where screen-based interfaces tend to get cluttered and
confusing.
Finally,
as with social, context is massively important to the way users access a
voice service. If they are using a phone they may be in public or at
home, they may be rushed or relaxed, and all these affect the service.
If the user is accessing the service via a smart speaker they are likely
at home but there may be other people present; again affecting the
detail of the service.
In
general, services well suited to voice will often be limited in scope
and be able to reward users with very little interaction; more complex
existing services will often need AI tools to further simplify their
access before being suitable to voice.
The voice landscape
In
the last two to three years the landscape of voice technology has
shifted dramatically as underlying technologies have reached important
thresholds. From Google and Amazon to IBM and Samsung, many large
technology companies seem to have an offering in the voice area, but the
services each offers differ wildly.
Devices and Contexts
It’s
important to note that many devices do have capabilities beyond voice
alone. Smart speakers generally are only voice, but also have lights
that indicate to users when they are listening and responding, and so
help to direct the conversation.
Newer
Alexa devices like the Echo Show and Echo Spot are now shipping with
screens and cameras built in, while Google Assistant is most commonly
used on smartphones where a screen mirrors the conversation using text,
by default. On smartphones and some other devices users have the option
to have the entire dialogue via text instead of voice, which can make a
difference to the type of input they receive as well as the nuances
available in the output.
Screen
based conversational interfaces are developing rapidly to also include
interactive modules such as lists, slideshows, buttons and payment
interfaces. Soon voice controlled assistants will also be able to use
nearby connected TVs to supplement conversational interfaces, although
what’s appropriate to show here will differ from smartphone interfaces.
As
should be clear, as well as a wide range of available capabilities, the
other major factor affecting voice interactions is context; users may
be on an individual personal device or in a shared communal space like a
kitchen or office; this affects how they will be comfortable
interacting.
Platforms and ecosystems
Amazon Echo speakers feature Alexa
Amazon Alexa
Perhaps
the most prominent UK/US based voice service is Amazon’s Alexa:
initially accessible via Echo devices but increasingly available in
hardware both from Amazon and third parties.
Amazon has a considerable first mover advantage in the market (72% smart speaker market share),
and it’s arguably the commercial success of the range of Echo devices
that has kick-started the recent surge in offerings from other
companies.
Alexa
is a consumer facing platform that allows brands to create ‘skills’
that consumers can install. End users configure Alexa via a companion
app; among other things this allows them to install third party ‘skills’
from an app store. An installed skill allows the end user to ask Alexa
specific extra questions that expose the skill’s service offering; e.g.
“Alexa, what’s my bank balance?”
There are now approximately 20,000 Alexa skills across all markets, up from 6,000 at the end of 2016. Although many have extremely low usage rates at present, Amazon has recently introduced funding models to continue to motivate third party developers to join its ecosystem.
With an estimated 32M Alexa-powered devices sold by the end of 2017
(of which around 20M in Q4) there’s no doubt that the platform has a
lot of reach, but Alexa’s skills model and Amazon’s overall marketplace
strategy combine to place brands very much in Amazon’s control.
Google Home features the Assistant. Image via google.com
Google Assistant
Google
launched the Home device, powered by the Google Assistant in May 2016,
over a year after Amazon launched the Echo. Google has been aggressively
marketing the Assistant (and Home hardware devices) both to consumers
and to partners and brands. Google already commands a market share (of smart speakers) of 15%, double that of the previous year; their market share of smartphone voice assistants is 46%, projected to rise to 60% by 2022.
Google’s
Assistant is also being updated with new features at an incredible
rate, and arguably has now taken the lead in terms of functionality
provided to users and third party developers.
Perhaps
most interestingly, Assistant takes an interesting and different
approach to brand integration compared to other offerings, with the
Actions on Google platform. Using this platform, brands are able to
develop not only the service offering but the entire conversational
interface, including the voice output of their service.
Users
don’t need to install third party apps but can simply ask to speak to
them; much the way someone might ask a switchboard or receptionist to
speak to a particular person. Once speaking to a particular app, users
can authenticate, allow notifications, switch devices and pay, all
through the Assistant’s conversation based voice interface.
By
integrating Assistant tightly with Android, the potential reach of the
platform is enormous; there are currently 2.5Bn Android devices in
operation. The software is also available to third party hardware
manufacturers, further increasing the potential of the ecosystem.
Cortana doesn’t have a dedicated device but is available on Windows and Xbox devices. Image via Wallpaperden
Microsoft Cortana
Microsoft’s Cortana is installed on every Windows 10 device and has an impressive 145M monthly active users (probably mostly via XBox), but is currently less heavily promoted and updated than the offerings from Google and Amazon.
Cortana
provides a similar ‘skill’ interface to Alexa, but has started
developing this relatively late and is playing catch-up both in terms of
core functionality and the number of available integrations.
Microsoft’s
huge overall user base and its dominance in both work-related software
and gaming ecosystems do give Cortana a powerful (and growing) presence
in the market, despite its share of dedicated smart speaker devices
being small.
Baidu’s Raven speakers are the company’s first foray into dedicated hardware for its well-known voice services. Image via Slate
Baidu
Baidu
(often called the ‘Chinese Google’) arguably started the recent trend
for voice interfaces with a combination of groundbreaking technology and
a huge installed user base with various cultural and socioeconomic
predispositions to favouring voice over text.
Baidu
recently released DuerOS, a platform for third party hardware
developers to build their own voice powered devices, and via the ‘Baidu
Brain’ offers a suite of AI platforms for various purposes (many
involving voice).
Most
consumers currently interact with Baidu’s voice technologies via their
Chinese language dedicated services (i.e. without any third party
integrations).
Siri, Bixby and Watson
Apple’s
Siri and Samsung’s Bixby are both voice assistants that currently only
work on a given device or perhaps in the manufacturer’s ecosystem;
neither could be called a platform as they don’t offer third parties
access to create services.
Both
have reasonable market share due to the number of phones they appear
on, but their gated offerings and lower accuracy voice recognition now
make them seem limited by comparison with other assistants.
IBM’s Watson is perhaps most usefully seen as a suite of tools that brands can use to create bespoke services.
Content and services
There
are a lot of considerations when designing services for voice based
conversational interfaces; these are touched on above but affect the
range of functionality that is available.
— Utility
The
vast majority of voice services currently available are utilities,
giving access to a simple piece of functionality already available via
other methods. These range from the more mundane (playing a specific
radio station or listening to news) to the more futuristic (adjusting
the lights or playing a specific film on the TV), via provider-specific
functions like ordering a pizza or a taxi.
Lots
of brands are beginning to offer services in this area, from home
automation or similar niche organisations like WeMo and Plex or Philips
Hue, to more widely used services like Uber and Dominos, but
interestingly also including big brands offering innovative services.
Both Mercedes and Hyundai, for example, allow users to start their cars
and prewarm them from various voice assistant platforms.
— Entertainment
Various
games, jokes and sound libraries are available on all the major
platforms from a variety of providers, often either the platform
provider themselves (i.e. Google or Amazon) or small companies or
individual developers.
The potential for entertainment pieces in this area is largely untapped; it is only just beginning to be explored.
Tools
Many
sets of tools exist for building voice services, as well as related
(usually AI based) functionality. By and large the cloud based services
on offer are free or cheap, and easy to use. Serious projects may
require bespoke solutions developed in house but that is unnecessary for
the majority of requirements.
All
these mean that prototyping and experimentation can be done quickly and
cheaply and production-ready applications can be costed on a usage
model, which is very cost effective at small scale.
— Speech Generation
Of
particular note to brands are the options around speech generation, as
these are literally the part of the brand that end users interact with.
If
the service being offered has a static, finite set out possible
responses to all user input, it is possible to use recorded speech. This
approach can be extended in some cases with a
record-and-stitch-together approach such as used by TfL.
For
services with a wide range of outputs, generated voices are the only
practical way to go, but even here there are multiple options. There are
multiple free, more-or-less “computer”-sounding voices easily
available, but we would recommend exploring approaches using voice
actors to create satnav-like TTS system.
The
rapidly advancing field of Machine Learning powered generated speech
that can sound very real and even like specific people is worth keeping
an eye on; this is not yet generally available but Google is already using Wavenet for Assistant in the US while Adobe was working on a similar project.
The technology behind voice
What people refer to as voice is really a set of different technologies all working together.
Notably, Speech To Text
is the ‘voice recognition’ component that processes some audio and
outputs written text. This field has improved in leaps and bounds in
recent years, to the point where some systems are now better at this
than humans, across a range of conditions.
In June, Google’s system was reported to have 95% accuracy
(the same as humans, and an improvement of 20% over 4 years), while
Baidu is usually rated as having the most accurate system of all with
over 97%.
The core of each specific service lies in Intent Derivation,
the set of technologies based on working out what a piece of text
implies the underlying user intent is — this matches user requests with
responses the service is able to provide.
The
recent rise in the number (and hype) of bots and bot platforms is
related to this technology, and as almost all voice systems are really
just bots with voice recognition added in, this technology is crucial.
There are many platforms that provide this functionality (notably IBM Watson, and the free DialogFlow, among many others).
The other important set of voice-related technologies revolve around Speech Generation.
There are many ways to achieve this and the options are very closely
related to the functionality of the specific voice service.
The
tools and options relating to this are explored earlier in this
article, but they range widely in cost and quality, based on the scope
of the service and the type of output that can be given to users.
Considerations
Creating a voice-first service involves additional considerations as compared to other digital services.
First
and foremost, user privacy is getting increased attention as audio
recordings of users are sent to the platform and/or brand and often
stored there. Depending on the manner in which the service is available
to users this may be an issue just for the platform involved, or may be
something the brand needs to address directly.
Recently the C4 show ‘Celebrity Hunted’ caused a bit of a backlash against Alexa
as users saw first hand the power of the stored recordings being
available in the future. There are also worries about the ‘always on’
potential of the recording, despite major platforms repeatedly trying to
assure users that only phrases starting with the keyword get recorded
and sent to the cloud.
As
with most things however, a reasonable value exchange is the safest way
to proceed. Essentially, ensure that the offering is useful or
entertaining.
A
phone on a dinner table is a lot more socially acceptable than it was a
few years ago. Talking out loud to devices will go the same way. Image
via musely.com
Another
consideration, as touched upon earlier in this article, is that the
right service for a voice-first interface may not be something your
brand already offers — or at the least that the service may need
adaptation to be completely right for the format. We’ve found during
workshops that the most interesting use cases for branded voice services
often require branching out into whole new areas.
Perhaps
most interestingly, this area allows for a whole new interesting set of
data to be collected about users of the service — actual audio
recordings aside, novel services being used in new contexts (at home
without a device in hand, multiuser, etc) should lead to interesting new
insights.
Recommendations for brands
We
believe that long term, many brands will benefit from having some or
all of their core digital services available over voice interfaces, and
that the recent proliferation of the technology has created
opportunities in the short and medium terms as well.
A good starting point is to start to include voice platforms in the mix for any long term planning involving digital services.
Ideally
brands should start to work on an overall voice (or agent, including
bots) strategy for the long term. This would encompass which services
might best be offered in these different media, and how they may
interact with customer services, CRM, social and advertising functions
as well as a roadmap to measure progress against.
In
the short term, we believe brands ought to experiment using
off-the-shelf tools to rapidly prototype and even to create short-lived
productions, perhaps related to campaigns.
The
key area to focus on for these experiments should be how the overall
brand style, tone of voice, and customer service scripts convert into a
voice persona, and how users respond to variations in this persona.
This
experimentation can be combined with lightweight voice-first service
design in service of campaigns, but used to build an overall set of
guides and learnings that can be used for future core brand services.
Rumu
is a very unique game, and of all the games on this list, I think it’s
the one that has the most unique UI. This is most likely due to the fact
that Rumu has pioneered the ‘Sentient Vaccuum Cleaner’ genre, and
there’s simply no game similar enough to pull inspiration from. Because
of this, I’ll briefly summarise the elements I liked the most, so you
have an idea of what I’m talking about.
It’s
fitting, then, that Rumu’s UI pulls from a number of different genres
and also remains quite unique. Rumu (The titular vacuum cleaner himself)
has a radial menu to manage it’s quest log and inventory. That’s about
where the traditional UI ends, and you start to see some bespoke
elements.
Tutorial
tips for controls appear outside the environments. This is a nice
detail, as it serves not only to communicate the key bind but also as a
hint of what you’re supposed to do in any given space.
A
similar method is used for doorways or vent spaces — each is earmarked
with text or iconography to indicate whether the player can pass
through. The difference is actually really important, because it serves
to split how the player treats information throughout the game — if the
information is inside the room, it’s something to be learned. If it
exists outside of the game space, it’s something that little Rumu
already knows.
There’s
a ‘Datavision’ function that allows Rumu to see how the various smart
devices and intractable objects connect. It’s a great way to declutter
the environments when the player is being task oriented, and it also
often hides hidden easter eggs or gadgets.
One
of the smartest UX features of Rumu is how it uses it’s palette and art
style to generate emotion. A clean, white kitchen feels calm and
simple, while crawling through vents on a sinister dark background gives
the game a sense of urgency and danger.
Rumu
is beautiful, functional, unique, and incredibly evocative. It’s UX
blends perfectly with the narrative of the game, and aids in the
storytelling.
Conclusion: Independent
developers are constantly coming up with new, interesting ways to
interact with their games. There’s even a few on this list: Hand of Fate
2 and Tooth of Tail both innovate in a well-trodden genre.
Rumu’s
a little different, because the robot vacuum cleaner genre isn’t quite
as mature as, say, first person shooters. Despite this, the interactions
in Rumu feel natural; the spacial and diagetic elements are what I’d
expect a robo-vacuum to see in the world, and the meta UI tips help move
the player along without breaking the (sometimes literal) fourth wall.
I look forward to seeing the robot vacuum cleaner genre evolve.
Worst: Stationeers
Picking
this game sparked an internal debate in my mind over having a ‘Worst’
section at all, but in the end I decided it’s always better to get your
feelings out than internalise them.
I
really enjoyed Stationeers; I played almost six hours straight in my
first run through. It’s an incredibly complex space space station
construction game. Most of it’s UI is inoffensive: a simple HUD with
your vitals and atmosphere stats, and a slot-based inventory system.
It
all falls apart for me in the item management. Rather than go into
specifics, I’ll give you an example: I need to take the empty battery
out of my welding torch, and replace it with a full one.
I
have to press 5 to open my tool belt, use the scroll wheel to highlight
the torch, press F to put it in my hand, press R to open the torch’s
inventory, press E to change hands, press F to move the batter into my
free hand.
Now
I press 2 to open my suit inventory, scroll wheel to an empty slot,
press F to place the flat batter in there. Scroll wheel to the full
battery, press F to place it in my off hand. Press E to change hands.
Press R to open the torch inventory. Press E to change hands. Press F to
place the battery in.
That’s…15 key presses. I can see what they were going for with this system, but there’s got to be a better way.
Virtual Reality
Best: Lone Echo
If
UX as a practice is still in it’s infancy, UX for VR is a single-celled
organism attempting mitosis for the first time. Nobody really has any
idea what’s going to work and what’s not going to work, and so many
games have great executions with a poor UX.
Lone
Echo feels like someone looking at what VR will be doing five years
from now, and dragged it screaming back into 2017. I don’t think it’s
hyperbole to say that Lone Echo’s UX will help define the future of
virtual and augmented reality interfaces.
There’s
no HUD in Lone Echo, instead opting to have your UI displayed from
various arm-mounted gadgetry. Jack, the player character, has a number
of controls and panels along his suit, each of which the player can
interact with to reveal various elements interfaces.
This
actually annoyed me at first — I wasn’t sure why a robot need any sort
of interface at all. However, the interactions available are just so
neat and genuinely enjoyable, it becomes a very small nitpick. You will
also witness other characters in the game use the same interface, which
gives some internal consistency to the game.
Talking
to someone, for example, is a matter of simply looking at them and
tapping a button the controller. This spawns a list of dialogue options
that you select with your finger. It’s a simple thing, but being able to
quickly interact with the object your looking at feels great.
Any
panels you summon are intractable with your hand. You can scroll and
tap like you would on an iPad. It feels completely natural to work with,
and there were very few times after the opening minutes where I had
trouble with this interaction style.
Similarly,
Jack’s wrist holds a number of functions and features that are
activated using your opposite hand. Slide across your forearm to open
your objectives. Tap the top of your wrist for your scanner, or the side
of your wrist for your welder. The interactions are so second-nature
after having used them a few times that I found myself not even looking
at my hands as I did these simple tasks.
Most
of what you see in Lone Echo comes from somewhere. The locomotion, the
dialogues, the tool interactions, are all borrowed from games that have
come before it. Lone Echo proves that these interactions are
unequivocally the right way to
do them, and if done right, can be so immersive and intuitive that the
player doesn’t have to remember them, they just become the way things are done.
Just like the brilliant writing and slick graphics, Lone Echo’s UX is the reason it’s
such a successful game. It keeps the player completely immersed in
everything they’re doing, no matter how complex the task. At it’s best,
the interactions in Lone Echo are actually fun to use. Menus that are fun! If that’s not a revolution, I don’t know what is.
Conclusion: The
most immersive experience I’ve ever had in a video game. Lone Echo
bends over backwards to put you in the moment with objects that behave
like the user expects they should, and an environment that is
consistently interactive.
Lone Echo isn’t held back by trying to
fit it’s UI into it’s narrative — it’s built it’s entire user
experience around the narrative, instead. Lone Echo sets the standard
for VR UX to come.
Worst: None
It’s
a cop out, I know. Truth be told, I haven’t played a VR game that
released in 2017 that had any truly awful UX. There’s plenty of games
that make some missteps, or the occasional obvious error, but this is
going to happen with a still-growing genre like virtual reality. For
now, VR gets a pass.
If
you got this far, thanks for reading! Hopefully you found something
interesting in my choices. Please feel free to comment with your
opinions, especially if there’s something great that I missed.
This
week, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on the future of
net neutrality. Whether you’ve been following the political back and forth,
skimming the headlines, or struggling to decode acronyms, the decision
will have an impact on what we can do online (and who can afford to do
it). Because the internet has effectively been free and open since the
day it was born, it’s easy to lose sight of the impact this vote will
have.
The reality is, the internet is a fragile thing. Open, crazy, weird spaces where people swap stories and secrets, create rad digital art projects,
type furiously and freely with people seven time zones away — these
spaces are rare. People build them, people sustain them, and now, people
are trying to restrict them. If this week’s vote passes — which is
looking increasingly likely — the internet’s gatekeepers will have more
control over their gates than ever before.
Because
we live and breathe the internet, laugh and cry on the internet,
connect with people who’ve tangibly changed our lives on the internet,
we decided to gather some perspectives on this moment in time. Why it
matters, how we got here, and what the future may hold. Here are some of
the most insightful essays we’ve found on Medium to help us make sense
of the fight to keep the net wild and free.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee
invented the World Wide Web. Now, he’s defending it. “I want an
internet where consumers decide what succeeds online, and where ISPs
focus on providing the best connectivity,” Berners-Lee emphasizes.
Content and connectivity are two distinct markets, and they must remain
separate. Conflating them risks blocking innovation, free expression, and the kind of creativity that can only thrive online.
What’s happening now is not just about net neutrality, law professor Lawrence Lessig
argues, but about the foundations of our democracy. Tracing the history
of the concept from its origins in the aughts (one of his students, Tim Wu,
coined the term “net neutrality”), Lessig sees the rollback of
Obama-era regulations as a symptom of a larger issue: a democracy that
doesn’t serve its people.
Through statistical analysis and natural language processing, data scientist Jeff Kao
shows that millions of pro-repeal comments submitted to the FCC were
faked. Organic public comments, according to Kao’s analysis,
overwhelmingly supported preserving existing regulations. The report
calls into question the legitimacy of the FCC’s comment process, and the
basis of chairman Pai’s intention to roll back regulations.
In part one of a five-part series on net neutrality, computer scientist Tyler Elliot Bettilyon
takes us back to FDR’s New Deal. Piecing together the history of
“common carrier” laws — those that govern everything from shipping to
telephone lines — Bettilyon contextualizes today’s fight for a free and
open internet.
Social psychologist E Price
interrogates the idea that the internet we’ve grown to love is really
as “free and open” as we’d like to think. “Internet activity is already
deeply centralized,” Erika writes, and major social media sites are
today’s answer to the Big Three TV networks of a few decades ago. The
internet is closer to cable than we think, and it’s (probably) about to
get even closer.
Why should the internet be a public utility? Economist umair haque
debunks the “competition will lower prices” argument against internet
regulation, and makes a compelling case for why going online, “just like
water, energy, and sanitation,” should be a basic right: “It
dramatically elevates our quality of life, best and truest when we all
have free and equal access to it.”
Visit battleforthenet to write or call your congressperson in advance of the vote. You can also text a few words of your choice to Resistbot.
Hardik Gandhi is Master of Computer science,blogger,developer,SEO provider,Motivator and writes a Gujarati and Programming books and Advicer of career and all type of guidance.
