Thoughts on ‘Alexios, the Spartan’
The companion Alexa Skill to ‘Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’ is one of my favorite #VoiceGame(-related) releases this year. In this article, I will introduce you to what it does, why I like it so much, and what we can all learn from it.
Wasn’t this released forever ago? Remind us of the context!
I’m indeed pretty late with this, since the Skill was already released released in mid-September (here’s the Voicebot article). You certainly remember this video:
The video and the Skill were released as a marketing asset for the PC and console game “Assasin’s Creed: Odyssee”, which was released itself on October 5th. Some of the Skill’s content was locked until that date, with the hint that after then, Alexios could tell you all about the ancient greek game world.
What does the Skill do?
It’s game companion Skill with Alexios, the spartan warrior as the bot persona, and it does four different things:
- Tell you about the lore and the lands of “Assassin’s Creed: Odyssee”
This is closest to what you’d expect from a companion Skill. I haven’t played the game myself, but the game world seems to be rather extensive, and you can ask about the different places (like Athens, Sparta, Mykonos, the Athenian Treasury and such) and lore (the Tomb of Orion, the battle of Giants versus Gods). The answers for places are surprisingly short (like ‘Sparta is like Athens, but without the beggars’), whereas those for lore are longer and actually interesting.
An important aspect is that these answers are not actually helpful for the game, at least not in any sense that I discovered. But the internet seems to agree with me: I don’t find much content where people show how their gaming experience is improved with the Skill. - Tell you about himself
A lot of what Alexios suggests you to ask him about is about him, like where he is from, who he is, what his favorite color his. Here are some of my highlights:
What’s your favorite movie? → ‘The one where a child violently defends himself while he is home alone… I can’t remember the title.’
What is your favorite food? → ‘Mmm… Bear intestines is my guilty pleasure?’
Who are you? → ‘I am an ancient Spartan warrior’s spirit, trapped inside a plastic cylinder.’
This is already one of my favorite aspects of the Skill, because Alexios is one of the game’s two playable characters, and players can use the Skill to interact with their in-game character! - Help you order your copy of “Assassins’s Creed: Odyssee”
In about every third or fourth welcome message, Alexios offers to help you ordering your copy of the game. This sounded very promising, so I agreed and had my voice PIN ready… What I got was Alexios’ message ‘Excellent choice, my friend! I will send a messenger pidgeon to your Alexa app. Click the link and you’ll be on your way to become a Spartan warrior.’
I don’t know what your impression is, but it seems to me as if to drive sales was not the prime objective of the Skill. There are no clickable links in Skill cards, and with the ten random alphanumeric characters (instead of a human-readable one like get-assassins-creed-dot-com), it’s a steep assumption that people will type it into their web browsers.
Wait, didn’t you say you like the Skill? So far, it sounds so-so!
Absolutely, and it’s because of item four of my list: Alexios serves as your voice assistant, and you can ask him all the stuff you typically ask Alexa! This is the part that I actually love about the Skill, because it simulates a custom theme for Alexa!
This sounds interesting! Can you elaborate on that?
With pleasure, this is a topic I love to think about! Right now, there’s the Alexa platform, and the Alexa persona is hard-wired into it. The fact that you can have either a male or a female Siri, or one of four voices (or so) for Google Assistant shows that it’s conceptually perceivable to have different assistant personas! In the pre-superbowl TV ads Amazon itself invoked the idea that you could have different celebrities as your assistant personas, and for me custom (maybe even crowdsourced) personas like Jarvis, KITT or GLaDOS are the number one value proposition of Mycroft.
Predecessors of this concept are custom (typically celebrity or comedian) voices for car navigation assistants — But I think this is easier because such systems have a more constrained vocabulary.
Alright, interesting! Now, you does Alexios perform as a themed voice assistant?
Well, once you accept that it’s all a parody and that it is a technically shallow Skill with no access to any outside data or persistence between interactions or even sessions, it’s astonishingly good and enjoyable!
In fact, it has so many great aspects that I will switch to bullet points:
- It has rich in-character answers to most of the standard requests that Alexa gets. Here are some short ones:
What’s the time? → ‘If the sun sits atop Mount Olympus, it is day?’
Set a timer! → ‘Use a sundial, like a normal person!’
Play a song! → 10 seconds of actual greek music
How’s the weather? → ‘Cloudy and foreboding, just how I like it!’
What are the news? → ‘Liars, thieves and scoundrels rule the world. Little has changed in the last 2000 years.
Order a pizza! → ‘I have ordered you pizza with cheese, mushrooms, and bear intestine!’ - It has surprising answers to domain-specific requests, like smart home or games:
Switch on the lights! → ‘I would, but I can not find the candle oil.’
Open the door! → ‘Do I look like a servant?’
Play ‘Would You Rather?’ → ‘Would you rather… I cut out your tongue or slice your windpipe, to shut you up?’
Play ‘Truth or Dare’! → ‘I dare you to stop playing childrens’ games!’
Tell me a bedtime story! → It’s in the video and quite sinister, but very in-character!
Give me pickup line! → ‘Call me Icarus, because I’m falling for you!’
Tell me a joke! → ‘An athenian declared war! Haha, get it?’ - It responds to some unexpected requests quite well:
Play music by Lady Gaga → ‘I do not listen to your grotesque modern music!’
Rude verbal offense → ‘Hush the forked tongue!’
Marry me! → ‘Your desperation would make me sick… If I could get sick!’
Fallback → ‘I am not programmed to care about such trivial matters!’ or ‘I only discuss such matters with other Spartans.’ - After each response, Alexios will make two or three suggestions of what to ask him, and these suggestion texts are quite numerous. For example, now that I have consumed more than an hour of Alexios content for the benefit of my esteemed readers, I still hear about new commands.
To me, the entire Skill feels like a bag full of Eastereggs! The content is so rich and good, and it’s fun to try out and explore what the Skill can and cannot respond to…. This depth and breadth of content compensates the technical shallowness to such a degree that this is the only Skill on Alexa where I have the same sense of enjoyable exploration like with Mitsuku, for example.
OK, cool! Is there anything we can learn from it?
Maybe! Let me take a step back: One of my content highlights of #VOICE18 (the Newark Voice Summit) was Philip Hunter’s talk on designing conversational agents, with the key point that you should not only expect, but encourage users to say unexpected things. I think this is great advice and I haven’t fully incorporated it in my own voice apps, but I think it’s a good idea to not only have specific responses for common things people say to voice apps (like ‘change the volume’, ‘open [some other Skill]’, offense or abuse), but to actually build in some eastereggs through which users can experience a different aspect of your Skill. For example, in a voice game you could have a response for ‘Do you have fun?’, ‘Make it more difficult!’ or ‘This is boring!’.
Did you try out Alexios? Is there anything remarkable I failed to remark upon? How do you like it? Which is your favorite easteregg? Do you build eastereggs into your voice apps, or like to explore them? I look forward to your response, either here or in Twitter!
