Voice isn’t quite there yet.
I have been reading a lot of articles around voice being the next big channel, so I thought I would share my experiences in testing them out in my day to day routine.
I spend a lot of time on either my Macbook or iPhone. Apple announced SIRI would be coming to IOS on Mac dubbed your “personal assistant” couldn’t be anything further from the truth. After ten frustrating minutes, I gave up as it didn’t get any of three tasks correct. It fails majorly in writing the body of a text, email or adding a calendar appointment. It does, however, get the core functions correct such as “send a message” or “open my calendar”. All three tests had to be overtaken by myself to complete them correctly and not look a drunken fool to the potential recipients.
I bought an apartment last year and thought I would like to make it smart where possible. For this, I purchased some Nest equipment, Philips Hue light bulbs and Alexa from Amazon to control all of these cool toys designed to make my life easier. Alexa being the leading player in voice technology looks sturdy out of the box but set up isn’t as straightforward as plug and play as you need to download the app then set it up just to work. It responds well but I have found that I don’t need to ask it anything other than random facts or football scores but more often than not prepare yourself to listen out for “Sorry I cannot do this”. You will hear it a lot. Setting it up to talk to other smart devices is tricky and time-consuming, and the UX on the app takes a bit of trial and error to things working.
The Phillips Hue lights setup gives you around 35 options of light settings that you need to put into a group that you name so I set up a group called “lights” for my living room, so Alexa understands it easier. When I now say “Alexa turn on/off the lights” it will perform this action about eighty percent of the time. Setting up the Nest products has proved impossible, and I still haven’t seen Alexa turn on my thermostat or turn off the security camera which is a real let down despite frustratingly trying to work it out on the app or speaking at the device. I have given up for now as turning the Nest thermostat by hand seems more convenient.
I work in the Banking sector where there is a lot of noise about voice-enabled apps and devices for account queries at the moment. Santander has launched a voice-enabled version of their online banking app. On Launching the app for the first time, the UI looks nice and all controlled by swipes and gestures to see your account information. There is a little red icon in the bottom right with a mic on it to launch the voice control function which again proved disappointing. You can only query one account at a time and ask it numerous questions of what you spent in places like Tesco or M and S. You can ask your balance and pay someone as long as its a person when I tried to pay a company like American Express it didn’t work. It won’t bring up a list of you direct debits or standing orders which I thought would be a standard function; I had to search manually for those.
In conclusion, voice is a potentially powerful interface we can use to help make our lives easier, but I think it’s too early to be deemed a successor to our current day to day devices as every product I have used from the hardware and apps fails to deliver usefulness over being a gimmick.
