The alarm-a personal experience with Voice.

Every day I set the alarm using Alexa the command is straightforward and almost the same every day.

"Alexa wake me up tomorrow at 5:30 AM".

To this command Alexa responds as "alarm set for 5:30 AM tomorrow"

I have been hearing the same response for the last month. In a well designed conversation this interaction could go differently, in several ways. Alexa could go with one of the following options.

"OK " Or "OK I'll wake you up at 5:30 AM" Or "You got it" Or  " 5:30 am tomorrow".

But Alexa does not do this. I hear the same responses over and over again every day. If I forget to say a.m.  Or p.m, Alexa immediately prompts me the next question "is that in the morning ? or in the evening?". This interaction has a promise of a great conversation but the overall experience falls short slightly.

Natural Conversation

How do you go from an artificial or synthetic conversation to a more lively one?

You mix things up a bit, just a bit so that there is some personality to the interaction. Every user needs the assurance, the feel that the interaction is going in the right direction. Progress has to be made without being repetitive or boring or synthetic. The flow has to be as natural as with a human.

Working with Alexa every day, leaves me wanting more just a little bit more. I really want to have a conversation not in a personal sense but in the same way I have one with other humans. This is not a huge ask. It merely requires a little more effort on the part off of the UI designer. A designer just needs to add a few variations, sprinkle in some nuances and keep a memory of how things worked so that the interactions improve, become more natural and continue to build confidence between the user and technology.

Alarms are typical example of how people do things over and over again. I have two different times of alarms during the weekdays.  Technologically, it is not hard for Alexa to remember that I wake up at 5:30 AM or 6:30 AM depending upon the day of the week. I do not have to specify exactly the time I need to be woken up every 24 hours or 25 or 23 hours.

Alexa does not yet have a regular alarm setting. Are you still me a set an alarm only in the next 24 hours from the time it is set. This means our user has to bear with the same monotonous and boring responses from Alexa each and every day. Even though Alexa Voice Service has several best practices and guides to program into the voice system I really get to experience no variations in the daily routine interaction.

90's Technology

This experience is similar to the time when I was programming the mouse click events without following any standard guidelines. My programs did what I  developer #n preferred, my colleagues programs did what they preferred or thought was much more intuitive. Our model was intuitive to us the developers but we created a nightmare for the users; or more work for one of us later when we had to snap to the same format after Q/A caught up with us. We would have passionate debate on the best way to click the mouse in an application. Just within one company, each feature team implemented the interface based on their preferences and the winner of the internal debates. As an industry the users suffered greatly until all of this was resolved with the standardization of the mouse interface.

What happens when a user right clicks, left clicks, click and drags, Double Clicks etc was standardized, in   pre-defined ways. The mystery and the mystique of programming the mouse was gone. And everybody was able to use the computer equally well irrespective of the program or application.

The Solution

Will conversation design get there? Definitely, it is far from there at this moment in time. We all technologists, UI designers and fellow-humans need to work together to bring about some standardization so that we all benefit from each others learnings.

This is my first ask for comments on variations you have experienced in daily routine conversations. Please send me your experiences and the impact in terms of freshness or déjà vu to help educate the user experience with voice.

PS. This was the first blog or piece of content drafted using voice dictation. It’s a pain so far but less than typing it up.