Hello Home.
Five years ago, who knew the future was voice (OK, other than Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft)? We were all busy talking about 3D, VR, AR and wondering how many ‘K’ you could squeeze into your TV.
With the long awaited UK release of Google Home and Apple working on a similar device, we are left pondering whether we can finally ditch the mouse/keyboard/display for a voice UI.
The tech giants have provided us with the hardware and the tools (blog posts on API.AI to come) and it’s up to us to generate not only engaging content for these devices, but an elegant, engaging, believable, interactive UX.
Herein lies the problem — UX&D will need to adapt. A deep understanding of disciplines such as linguistics will play a prominent role in UX if we are to deliver something better than “Say “yes” if you want to hear this article, or “next” to hear the next one”. Intonation is key and with further developments of standards such as SSML (<ssml:sarcasm> anyone?), we should start to interact with a voice which resembles a human, rather than Twiki (showing my age now).
Voice interaction is not a new thing of course. It has been with us for well over a decade, evolving from call routing IVR systems (who has ever liked those), dedicated single function voice UI such as the original Google Voice Search and more recently the emergence of ‘personal assistants’ such as Siri and Cortana. These will continue to evolve, as will the voice AI behind then, with the Tech giants adding more features and integrations into their personal assistant. We should not try and compete on that playing field, just give them a pat on the back that machine learning is finally living up to the hype!
As a media organisation, we are focussing on our USP — trusted, educated and engaging content (Brian Moore’s Full Contact and Chopper’s Brexit Podcast) whilst we mature our audio strategy and sonic branding. Whether the dedicated voice app takes off will be apparent with time. As Mehdi points out, the future of the traditional branded website and accompanying app is in the balance; only time will tell if the same applies to the voice app. Personally, a dedicated voice news app is unlikely to provide a significantly better experience than the native voice AI. We should be working on the next ‘killer app’.
Voice activated devices are here to stay and, unlike an 8K TV, accessible for the majority. Let’s get content out there and get the creative juices flowing for this new medium.
