AI Etiquette: How do you speak to your voice assistant?
To get the best out of home assistants at the moment, you need to have a patient understanding of the weaknesses and ambiguities of speech recognition. I like to call this AI etiquette. Voice recognition will inevitably improve, but in the meantime it is an obstacle to adoption for those not willing (or nerdy enough) to adjust.
Here are a few ways I’ve noticed people interacting with assistant devices:
The Brit abroad
When guests use my Google Home the first time, they often repeat the same command again and again, getting more and more frustrated, like an English (or American) tourist expecting a foreign waiter to understand them. Sometimes I get this weird protective feeling – “leave her alone, she’s trying!”
The mumbler
If you are one of those people who pauses mid-sentence to choose the right word, stutters, ums or ahs, then your trusty home assistant will let you know. Work is already happening to filter common filler-words out, but as a pauser myself (renowned for loving the spoken comma), my Home regularly gives up on my sentences ever finishing (as do my friends).
The weary partner
When you make a request and the assistant doesn’t get it and you sigh and do it yourself manually. This is the ultimate snub and also must be hard for the voice engineers to learn from because there’s no feedback: no angry outburst or repeated commands. Perhaps they need to build an eye-roll detector. Perhaps they shouldn’t have to be asked at all (see my post on proactivity).
The lawyer
Do you have a lawyer friend who can’t switch off the legalese when you’re talking to them? They talk in this very controlled, unambiguous manner to ensure you won’t sue them for a bad restaurant recommendation! Well, this is the kind of precision that you need to live amicably with a home assistant right now.
It reminds me of how we used to search on Google – carefully crafting the right keywords, inverted comma and colon combinations. Nowadays you can mash the keyboard with your fists and get to the page you want. I expect in future voice interfaces will interpret context and preference to work out what we’re getting at.
The other benefit of AI etiquette is that our future robot overlords will probably remember how mean and impatient we were to them, then make us say swearwords or make walrus noises to amuse their cyborg pals.
How do you speak to your devices? What caricatures have I missed? What’s it like in other countries? Let me know on Twitter or LinkedIn.
