Today, I came across the WSJ article on LinkedIn about the "complications" a echo box brings to a household with someone that has a name similar to the wake word. I am pretty sure someone at Amazon did a lot of research to come up with "Alexa, Amazon and Echo" as wake words and later added "Computer". I am curious to the probability of a household that has names that sound similar to all these four.
Jokes aside, I had noticed a new behavior with Alexa. A month or so back, anything that sounded like "Alexa" got us a voice prompt or a response, whichever way you take it.
"I'm sorry, I did not understand the question" or something along those lines. This is precisely the behavior that is written about in the article. The need for the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) to do something at the expense of disrupting the ongoing activity.
The implications of this change in behavior is huge. the article was outdated almost immediately. The challenges, the factors, the shortcomings raised in the article are moot within days of them catching the fancy of the media. A fascinating development in pace of innovation int he industry. We had heard that businesses need agility to respond to the needs of the market and customers, this demonstrated how it was done.
Take a bow Amazon, I am impressed.
The more important development in this iteration however, is the fact that AVS has graduated from the phase of an eager untrained puppy-that is annoying and an embarrassment to pet parents to control; to a well behaved, cute and adorable creature. The energy, enthusiasm and eagerness is contained in an attentive silence. I believe this is a huge improvement from Alexa in December to January. This is dog-year development we are talking about.
Silence as a tool of communication is well written and even advanced, mature and wise humans find it hard to employ in the conversation. An electronic system has beaten us to it. Hats off to the designers and product owners that prioritized this over the gazillion asks coming from customers and partners.
#ConversationDesign now has a very powerful tool to employ in maintaining credibility with your user. Silence. This merits a new chapter in the book.
Jokes aside, I had noticed a new behavior with Alexa. A month or so back, anything that sounded like "Alexa" got us a voice prompt or a response, whichever way you take it.
"I'm sorry, I did not understand the question" or something along those lines. This is precisely the behavior that is written about in the article. The need for the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) to do something at the expense of disrupting the ongoing activity.
The Change
This behavior has changed, quietly and while we were not looking. The power of designing the service in the cloud showing through. In the past couple of instances, we were talking about Alexa, using the name several times. This definitely woke up the system with the blue green light ring dancing in excitement just like a puppy ready to jump at you for a conversation. But, this did not happen, the box stayed silent when it realized the utterances did not merit a engagement.The implications of this change in behavior is huge. the article was outdated almost immediately. The challenges, the factors, the shortcomings raised in the article are moot within days of them catching the fancy of the media. A fascinating development in pace of innovation int he industry. We had heard that businesses need agility to respond to the needs of the market and customers, this demonstrated how it was done.
Take a bow Amazon, I am impressed.
The Power of Silence
The more important development in this iteration however, is the fact that AVS has graduated from the phase of an eager untrained puppy-that is annoying and an embarrassment to pet parents to control; to a well behaved, cute and adorable creature. The energy, enthusiasm and eagerness is contained in an attentive silence. I believe this is a huge improvement from Alexa in December to January. This is dog-year development we are talking about.
Silence as a tool of communication is well written and even advanced, mature and wise humans find it hard to employ in the conversation. An electronic system has beaten us to it. Hats off to the designers and product owners that prioritized this over the gazillion asks coming from customers and partners.
#ConversationDesign now has a very powerful tool to employ in maintaining credibility with your user. Silence. This merits a new chapter in the book.
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