Google Duplex’s ally — Grandpa?

How modern products are leaving senior citizens behind, and what we can do about it.

Like many of you, while I was contemplating the possibilities and challenges after Sundar Pichai’s unveiling of Google Duplex, and after reading the blog post about it, I coincidentally received two interesting requests on the very same day.

An elderly neighbor called me to see if I would be available to help him get his new iPhone X to synch with his car so that he could use the GPS from his phone for his upcoming road-trip.

The other call was from Grandpa seeking help in navigating his online purchase of new prescription eye-glasses. He has a trip coming up this weekend and would like his order placed before that trip, and the glasses delivered at his vacation home, he said. I went over to his place and spent an hour in front of his computer, navigating the website myself until I completed his purchase. He was sitting by my side answering my questions as we went about (what started seeming like an intricate process of) purchasing the prescription glasses. It gave me a completely new perspective on how unfriendly and cumbersome an elegant looking website can be for the occasional ecommerce shopper, or for the uninitiated user.

As I was going through the ecommerce transaction on behalf of Grandpa, I could sense a similarity between my conversation with him, and the conversations of the AI-powered Google Assistant with the restaurant staff where dinner reservations were being booked (listen to the voice samples in the blog post) — a lot of back and forth just to obtain clarification, but without the “mmm hmm”.

It also reminded me of a fascinating talk by Barbara Beskind, the 92-year-old designer at IDEO (watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEV5uq_tiw4) about designing not just for the elderly, but with the elderly.

I have navigated the same eye-glass shopping website about 5 times before, and it always seemed very easy to use — but designing Internet products and experiences has been a big part of my life for some years. By force of habit and with a keen awareness of industry conventions I just happen to know what a certain icon means and where I must mouse-over on the cool-looking website to reveal the login-box. Grandpa simply couldn’t find it.

Now imagine if Google Duplex could be trained and configured by every website owner to offer its own customized voice-assisted navigation of their individual website. The audio-visual experience will certainly continue on the website, but without the guesswork of navigation.

That would drastically bring down website visitor abandon rates. It would reduce customer support costs dramatically. It would attract more shoppers to ecommerce websites. In the early days of the web, we used to add a plug-in for a virtual concierge to show up in a pre-recorded video. It was always startling for the first-time visitor, but it still helped engage the attention of the website visitors with a personalized message by the virtual concierge. Google Duplex can do better with just the voice. There isn’t even a need for a moving image of a personal concierge on the webpage.

All it takes is a patient and kind voice that can answer all the questions of elderly users, patiently going back and forth on feature selection, allowing them to change their mind endlessly, without them ever having to touch the mouse. More importantly, they also should not have to feel obliged to someone for possibly imposing on them. Google Duplex could make the elderly digitally fluent.

That feeling of independence, where they do not have to go around asking for help to just carry on with their daily life surrounded by hi-tech products, in a sense, would indeed be very liberating for digital immigrants. Google Duplex may have a new ally in Grandpa.

The author Ramesh Sambasivan is the principal designer and program lead at SiliconGlades, a business innovation and design firm that helps startups with product marketing viewed through a social-impact lens, and helps more established organizations uncover their Sales DNA to achieve growth while giving.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 323,834+ people.

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