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Building Voice Experiences for Children!

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Hello!

I’m Jeremy Wilken, @gnomeontherun

Google Developer Expert in Google Assistant and Web Tech

Work @ VMware, Austin, TX

Host Design for Voice Podcast https://designforvoice.com

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Goals for this session

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  • Learn about design principles based on observations, experiments, and research
  • Get some tips on how to design, build, and test
  • Hear some funny (and some sad) stories
  • Go forth and build better apps for children (and all people)

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400,000,000

Children with potential access

to voice assistants by 2021

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Source: https://voysis.com/state-of-voice-adoption-spring-2018/

Calculated against average of 26% of population are under 15 years old globally https://www.statista.com/statistics/265759/world-population-by-age-and-region/

An estimated

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“Children acquire language quickly, easily, and without effort or formal teaching. It happens automatically, whether their parents try to teach them or not.”

  • Linguistics Society of America

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Defining qualities of kids and their voices

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  • Their voice data is much thinner, less data
  • Smaller vocabulary
  • Annunciation challenges
  • Imperfect grammar
  • Limited access to devices
  • Attention is easily scattered
  • Emotional firecrackers

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It didn’t

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Latency exists, consider it early

  • Understand the built in timeouts and latency of your platforms, test with latency
  • Consider providing immediate response and follow up when ready
  • Emphasize that you heard them, but follow up for what you didn’t understand
  • Don’t assume they can see a visual indicator

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Design for emotion

  • Kids are emotional (adults have feelings too)
  • Consider how people might feel before, during, and after using your app
  • Use proper tone at different states in your app
  • Test with over-emphasized dramatic personas to increase empathy
  • Listen to people using your app

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Where is in

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Speech to Text is imperfect

  • Review your utterances and responses for common similar sounding words, train for them
  • Don’t assume full accuracy, check confidence scores, use confirmations
  • You might only get part of what was said
  • Test with higher pitched voice and accents
  • Test in non-ideal situations, loud rooms, crying

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Design for small talk

  • Design an app personality, plan for small talk
  • When do you want to repair the conversation, and when do you want to give up?
  • Plan for providing help and guidance
  • Handle exits and limits to the experience
  • Try non-standard paths through the app

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Alexa, What’s

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Disambiguation is not an option

  • Kids say the darndest things
  • Design prompts for clarification when requests are vague
  • When in doubt, ask for yes/no confirmation
  • Test with intentionally vague statements
  • Research words with double meanings
  • Rigorously test without using slots

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Deal with repetition, offer a path forward

  • Don’t repeat system responses
  • Provide clear prompts and guidance
  • Carefully craft follow up prompts, use increasingly more helpful prompts for repair
  • Consider slowing speech to help understanding
  • Watch for repeated statements in analytics
  • Test by repeating the same statements

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Alexa, why are

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Expect the unexpected

  • Design with a large view of potential input
  • Put yourself into real world scenarios to gather insight into people’s mindset
  • Interview a diverse set of users
  • It’s ok not to handle every utterance, so long as you provide the next step
  • Prototype early with children

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I want to play

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Enrich the experience

  • Kids need to be engaged at their level, hire writers, use sound effects, animations
  • Replayability is important, kids can be very repetitious
  • Repetitive experiences are usually poor, add serendipity along the way
  • Use the screen, but don’t assume reading level

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A few More

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Design once, design twice, design again

  • Design up front saves development efforts and improves resulting experience
  • Aim to be natural, but it has limitations
  • Test dialogs out loud before coding
  • Have a system persona to guide your dialogs
  • Consider devices with screens early

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Quick Recap

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  • Adults are not that different from kids, we all make voice mistakes
  • Design for universal use, which includes kids even if it’s not a ‘kids app’
  • Try acting like a kid. It’s fun, and it can show some weaknesses in your voice app
  • General design processes will help you greatly

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Want a free design review?

Sign up at

designforvoice.com

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THANKS!

Jeremy Wilken @gnomeontherun

https://designforvoice.com

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