Alexa. Tell me a brand’s story.
With all the recent hype around voice enabled AI, there’s been a lot written about the UX of VUI or the business of AI. It got me wondering: Imagine if tomorrow, we stopped using screens (as if!) and our main medium was voice activated AI like Alexa, Siri, or Google home? How does a brand’s story and identity come across with just sound and conversation? What are the possibilities for brands?
Story Tools
Firstly, by ‘story’, I don’t necessarily mean a brand’s history, although sometimes that is important. I’m talking about what makes a brand, their values, their mission, what they stand for and offer, their identity. There are many tools to tell that story and branding is one (colours, logo, type, tone of voice, actions, etc…) but when you’re looking at Voice User Interface (VUI) like in Alexa, branding is stripped back to pretty much 3 things: tone of voice, customer experience and the interaction’s outcome.
When you’re looking at VUI like Alexa, branding is stripped back to pretty much 3 things: tone of voice, the customer experience and the interaction’s outcome.
Tone : Do you trust your AI?
Tone of voice and vocabulary are interesting because it’s the two things we can work with right now. But here is another caution — when using something like Alexa you’re not interacting with a brand directly, but primarily with Alexa, and the line between Alexa and that brand can seem blurry.
Some Brands still struggled with social media, and adjusting to being behind someone else’s product and brand can be challenging.
Just like with social media, not every brand will understand the required shift in the way they communicate with their customers, but those that do have the opportunity to stand out.
When Alexa gives feedback on her interaction with your product, there could be an opportunity here to be inventive with getting your values across
If you trust Alexa, It’s almost like having a mate telling you about how good a brand is or witnessing her using a product and see how good that felt. When Alexa gives feedback on her interaction with your product, there could be an opportunity here to be inventive with getting your values across. For example, if you’re getting a free pastry with your coffee order, Alexa could say:
— “That’s nice, the barista is offering us a free pastry, what would you like with your coffee?”
or she could give some extra information about the product:
— “Your fair-trade coffee served in a sustainable cup will be ready in 15mins for pick-up”
or have some random reactions like:
— “Hmmm the smell of freshly grind coffee, I could do with a coffee too, yours will be ready in 15mins for pickup”
There’s obviously a big danger here! I imagine going too far would be a problem. People are getting used to Alexa’s personality and altering it too much would be a messy and confusing experience. It’s like if one of your good friend suddenly behaved like a butler when he gets in the car or pretend to be Jamie Oliver when helping cooking. Same goes with using regional sayings or changing the level of familiarity the AI has with you.
People are getting used to Alexa’s personality and altering it too much would be a messy and confusing experience.
Conversation Design
Humans have this amazing ability to project ourselves in time, to imagine and dream of possibilities, reclaim memories but also fear the unknown and our future. We’re emotional beings and we can transpose that emotion onto anything, reading between lines and attaching feeling to objects. Brands and advertising use this and often abuse it by playing with our fears and desires, tricking us into thinking we absolutely need their products.
At the moment, those voice activated AI are not very emotional and pretty rubbish at holding a conversation that goes beyond being asked to do basic stuff and replying that it’s done (or the frustratingly familiar “I wasn’t able to understand the question I heard”).
They lack energy and spontaneity, and creating an emotional connection through VUI is going to be hard for a while yet. Still, intelligent AI is new and exciting, and quite a lot of energy comes from us wanting to believe they are ‘real’. The rest is space for some clever UX design to create an illusion of intelligence.
Sound Design
In the future, some brands might be able to have their own voice (cars manufacturers and home appliances, for example) and we could become more comfortable interacting with AI that have a personality and a voice. Just like some actors, brands will have a recognisable voice that are part of their DNA and IP. (Think Morgan Freeman or Alan Rickman)
Sound design might even help us support the AI with background ambience or light sound touch to set the brand’s identity.
Add value or get forgotten
Voice activated AI are all about serving the user, supporting them and making their life easier. So before creating a bot or a skill, you should ask yourself: What will the user get from it?
At the moment most skills for Alexa are gimmicky and add nothing to the experience of any real value to the user’s life. If you want to stand out, be user centric and add value or be forgotten.
While there are now more than 7,000 Skills to choose from on the Alexa platform, only 31% have more than one consumer review. — 2017 voicelabs’ report
As with any product or service, The best way to get your brand values through is with the value you’re adding to the user’s experience.
We will face challenges and make mistakes
Discovery
I know it’s very new and people are just getting used to talking to a robot but most use Alexa’s default capabilities and don’t search any further. How are we going to communicate the existence of our new apps for VUI? At the moment Alexa won’t chat to you about what’s available so you have to grab your phone and browse the crappy skills store.
Over-promising
I think the first mistake came from the people who are creating AI personalities: they over-promised. If you are expecting to have a conversation with a robot but it fall flat after one sentence then your experience shatters and you may lose your audience. That’s part of what happened to Siri.
This is not the web
It’s often said that we’re visual beings, but this medium won’t be about promoting visual products or complex e-commerce. Far more likely are practical tools, lifestyle hacks and maybe conversation with the brand.
If you try to replicate a website, how would the Information Architecture come through? How would the user know to explore what they don’t know or can’t visualise? How will they know where they are and what can be explored?
Sound and conversation are momentary and so keeping track of what has been said can be difficult. But it’s worth remembering that voice is more natural than text, as Marcel Just said about printed text in a recent interview:
“It’s very convenient and it’s worked very well for us for 5,000 years, but it’s an invention of human beings. By contrast Mother Nature has built into our brain our ability to see the visual world and interpret it. Even the spoken language is much more a given biologically than reading written language.” — Marcel Just’s interview
Final words
At this point it’s hard to predict how ubiquitous VUI will be, or what the biggest use cases will be.
What matters is that it’s new and young and we need to start experimenting now, to make those mistakes, to fail and learn so when we have the opportunity we will be ready, not just with thoughts but with data and case studies.
Illustration by Ryan Phipps Mitchel — http://rpm-design.co.uk/
Edited by Luke Gibson — @heylukegibson
