Designing Voice Driven Experiences- UXDX

Good to see you guys. What a nice crowd we have. We'll see how this goes. So you've seen this before? Yes? Raise your hand if you've seen an Alexa device. Okay. Put them down. That was everybody. That's awesome. So you saw the Super Bowl then, maybe, or a commercial or two. How many of you own an Alexa device? A smaller number, but well done, you guys. Love it. Okay, cool. So as you could tell, right, this Alexa device actually has a nice red ring on it, which means that Alexa's not listening to me right now. However, I have connected Alexa to the RDS Wi-Fi. All right, cool. Let's see how this goes. Alexa, what time is it? The time is 5:12 AM in Boston, which is where I'm from. So if I don't— if I'm not completely coherent, now you understand. Alexa, tell me a joke. What's a pirate's favorite exercise? The plank. And she's full of jokes just like that. So go running. Get yours today. So I'm going to mute Alexa again. Oh, actually, well, I'll come back to this. But we have a couple of interesting things I wanna share with you today. My name is Noelle Russell. I am an early adopter of Alexa. I built some of her very first skills. I've been building for Alexa, oh, since 2014, I guess. My skills, you might— some of you know them. If not, you certainly will want to. One is called Daily Affirmation, which you just ask it for an affirmation, and it will say, you're awesome and wonderful, and people like you. And you can go on your way. There's a— do you guys know like Saturday Night Live? Well, I'm not dating myself, but there's this guy, Stuart Smalley. Anyway, you can look him up on YouTube. I built it around that, but then it took off and people were actually seriously using it, so I got serious about it. Ended up building then One Minute Mindfulness, which is exactly what it says, one minute of mindfulness. Yeah, I know all of you are thinking, one minute, that's not nearly enough. Well, that's exactly what my reviewers have said, but I stand firm in my marketing and I have not elongated my One Minute Mindfulness scale, because I think it should— it's— advertised in a minute, it should be a minute. But my customers, all of them, to the tune of, I don't know, 2,500 reviews, have said it should be longer than a minute. Don't fault people for doing exactly what they're telling you they're gonna do. But I like it, so you should try that one. But I've built many skills. Probably 20+ skills are published on Alexa that I have either built or helped to build. And so my goal over the next 20 minutes is really to just share with you my journey, what was very different about it from a UX perspective, and then hopefully give you some inspiration to try some of this fun stuff yourself. So this is us, really, right? I actually have been part of probably the majority of this slide, right? Where when I first became interested in software and software engineering, we were just on that cusp of like, moving from things like mainframes, which are still alive and well, thankfully, mainframes into a more user interface world. And then we were all part of that wonderful 2006 launch of the iPhone, which changed us forever. And now we're seeing another one of these kind of big shifts, right? I remember early, I used to teach for IBM, teach mainframe people how to write Java programming language. And they, at that point, had never used a mouse before. Like, I'm teaching them object-oriented technology, and they'd never used a mouse. It was a very bizarre time. However, I'm in the same time now, right? I'm teaching people to write user interfaces, which, when we say UI, people instantly think a screen. Instantly. And now we do have a screen in Alexa, but we very rarely designed for it, right? If it happens to have a screen, awesome. If you happen to be able to show a card or some kind of display, even better. But very rarely do we consider that as part of our user interface. And I'll actually be on a panel later this afternoon talking to you more about some of the intricacies of what those decisions, how those decisions changed as we moved from kind of a mobile, centralized, focused world world, even at Amazon, into VUI, or Voice User Interfaces. So we do believe that voice— and I apologize if you can't read it all, but it's like one of those tests where we give you some of the words but not all of them and see if you can still understand it. But we believe voice represents kind of the next major disruption in computing. Similarly, when screens became a thing, and then when little screens became a thing, Now no screens are a thing. And we actually found that it's extremely delightful for our customers. So I started with Amazon 3 years ago, which means I'm a dinosaur in that sense. But I have worked for AWS, I now work for Alexa Machine Learning, and I work on the brain or the heart of Alexa, right? How does Alexa get smarter every day? Can't really talk to you too much about all those pieces, so happy to discuss with you, I'll be here all day. And the panel this afternoon. So happy to answer questions, you know, over coffee or whatever, as I see you. Oh yeah, feel free to take, like, Twitter pictures and stuff. I mean, I hope I get a copy of that picture. So I don't fully buy into this, but it just sets the stage for what we're talking about, right? Soon, touch could be gone. And all we do is talk. It's similar to what my dad used to think. He's an old Asimov, like, golden age of science fiction, loves the ideas that were presented in those acts of fiction. But now, right, he's in his 70s. He actually was hit by a car, so he's cognitively probably more in his 80s. But I bought him an Alexa device. And he uses it every single day to turn on his lights with his voice, right? And he finds it fascinating, especially any Star Trek— you don't have to raise your hands, but Star Trek lovers, I know you are. We now have the ability to use a different wake word other than Alexa, which you heard me say. We also have computer, right? So now he can be like, computer, turn the lights on, or computer, He can even say, "Open the pod bay doors." I should totally try that for you. But it works. She has a response. But it's interesting, because he never thought in his lifetime that would happen, right? When he read those books when he was 12 and 15 years old, he never thought in his lifetime he would be speaking to his software and having things actually happen. He navigates music like the best of them now. Plays random classical music from composers I have never heard of, and I'm pretty I'm pretty much a classical buff. But he's like, "Oh, I went to that concert in 1952." And I'm like, "Wow, incredible." So it really opens up the world, not only for elder care, but also for little people, as well as anyone with disabilities who maybe can't see a screen, right? It just creates a huge opportunity. So though this is kind of like, you can imagine a day when we never have screens, Amazon's not looking to end the screen, even though Fire Phone was a rough experience for us. I owned one. I loved it. But we're not looking to end the screen. We're looking to really augment it, add to it. And this certainly has turned out to be a pretty good experiment. So voice is going to be everywhere. You can imagine a time— and even today this happens. I used to live in Seattle before I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. And in Seattle, I was part of this wonderful ecosystem in Amazon where I could at work call Amazon Prime Now and say, which is our service that gets you anything within an hour, and I would say, "Oh, all right, I'm on my way home. It's Tuesday. We do tacos on Tuesday." I think it's actually International Taco Day today. I'm just saying. You might want to Google it. But so let's just say I wanted to make tacos. I would call or get on my phone and say, "Here's what I need for Taco Tuesday." You would imagine a time when Amazon's smart enough to know exactly what I mean by that. I'm sorry. Exactly what I mean by that, right? It probably will be a time where it's, oh, you order the same exact 12 things every Tuesday or every Monday night or whatever. So it goes out, grabs that stuff, and starts shipping it to my house within an hour while I get in traffic and spend an hour in traffic getting home. By the time I get home, the stuff I ordered is sitting on my doorstep. I pick it up, walk inside, and say, hey, Alexa, I'm ready to cook. Alexa already knows I made that order. Alexa already knows what I want to do and says, great, don't forget to set the temperature on your stove. You can imagine a time when your stove's smart enough to hear you say that, right? And it can turn itself on. Scary stuff, I know, I know. It could be— the smartphone was a very scary thing when we first got it. So it all starts scary, and then it's cool. But you can see where I'm going, right? Where it becomes this just kind of conversational state you're always in with your device to help you get through, in this case, meal preparation. As I mentioned, maybe there's a time where I'm— I forget to make the order when I'm at my phone or at my desk with my phone. So instead, maybe I want my car to be able to take that order, or I want my car to be able to navigate me because I'm in traffic, find a detour. And I don't want to have to open my phone. I don't want to have to click a button. I don't even want to have to click the button on my steering wheel. I know, first world problems. But it is— it could happen. And I do find it's quite delightful. And it actually is— I have a Dot. I don't know— I actually have one here. So I'll show it to you guys if you see me after. But I have a little Dot. It's like a hockey puck size. Fits conveniently right in my cup holder. I tether it to my phone. And Bluetooth it through my car speakers. And it's awesome. I can have it read me a Kindle. I can have it do Audible. You know, like, it's amazing. And of course, I can have it randomly play any music I can think to ask for. So I think it's really cool. The last part is really about bringing— that's like a living room, right? Bringing Alexa into the home. So today we have products like the Show. I've actually become very fond of it because it allows you to see the time. It allows you to see what recipe you're on. You can even use your screen to kind of scroll through. So it does give us the ability to, in addition to our voice, design for a, what we call now, a multimodal experience. And a multimodal experience, that is the future, right? Is that the customer wants to be able to communicate in whatever's super convenient for them at the time. Jeff Bezos always says, we will never, you know, we'll never be in trouble Because customers will never say, oh, I don't want more features, and oh, I'd really wish these were more expensive, and gee, I wish it was less convenient, right? People always want better stuff, more convenient, and like available immediately. So if we're always indexing on those desires, we'll always be okay. And that's why our mission at Amazon is not about Alexa, it's not about books, It's not about really anything specifically. It's about customers. We wanna be the Earth's most customer-centric company. So we look at our customers and all of our roadmaps in our organization, including UX, is designed by the customer, and that's really what changes the way we do business. So that's kind of the inside of that in case you were ever wondering. It does have 7 microphones. We use echolocation and You'll see, kind of over here, there's 7 of them. When I start speaking to Alexa, you'll notice there's a light ring. I used to wear it on my shirt, but I kind of have a light ring on my shirt. Alexa. You can kind of see this light ring. Some of you in the back might have trouble. But you can see a light ring. It gets a little bit lighter. That's the microphone that's actually focused on my voice and beamforming what I'm saying into the device and sending it to the cloud. Eventually Alexa realized, I was not talking to Alexa, and shut down. So there's what's called endpointing that occurs in the cloud that decides if you were actually speaking to this device or were you accidentally saying it, or— I actually am on a panel, I think today or maybe next month, with someone named Alexa, which is always fun. Anyway, so that's just to give you an idea of what's in there. It's not much, right? That is all of Alexa right there. Alexa is actually the software in the cloud. This is just the Echo device, but the rest of that device, other than that little piece at the top, is speaker, right? So that's ultimately what you're paying for. It's a really good speaker. So speech advancement, this is another reason why UX is really important right now for voice, to think about it. Even if you're not doing it, you should be thinking about this, right now, because if you were thinking about this 10 years ago, you probably, even with the technology that you had, wouldn't have a great experience. I won't say the experiences we might have had back then, even just maybe 7, 10 years ago, but our voice experiences were not delightful. Customers did not believe in them. They didn't end up working out very well. There's a reason why Alexa today today is doing as well as Alexa is doing. And the reason is, is because our speech and language understanding has gotten exponentially better. And now we have even more players in the market, right, like Google and Siri, and there's others, I'm sure, right? There's tons of startups that are building their own. There's this, I can't remember, it's like xAI or something like that. Anyway, but there's tons of machine learning tools that are being built, all of which require a good user experience and most of which were not created by people that excel at that. Right? So huge opportunity. So in the store, one of the things that differentiates Alexa from any other platform really is the ability for us to improve Alexa and make Alexa smarter ourselves as individual contributors. So as I mentioned, I was not working for Alexa when I started building apps for Alexa or skills for Alexa. So my daily affirmation skill actually built as part of a challenge at work. But none of us worked for the team at that time. And then I was like, whoa, that's pretty fun. Now, so at that time, I think there were 140 skills in the store. They're now over— I think this is even now 16,000. It's growing massively. It'll be 20,000 in a month, like It'll just grow exponentially from here as well. But this is your opportunity, right? Just think about the App Store when it only had 10,000 apps in it. Now it has billions, and we're still leveraging it quite heavily every day, or at least I am. So this is our— the skills concept is how we build applications for Alexa, how we make Alexa smarter all the time. So these are our devices. As you, some of you might be Kindle owners or Kindle Fire owners. One of the really interesting things that happened recently is your Kindle Fire became a multimodal Alexa device. We released a fix or an over-the-air update, and that over-the-air update enabled your Alexa device to operate this way. So you couldn't call it, like it wasn't what we call far-field, Meaning I could stand far away and be like, hey, Fire tablet, turn my TV on. You couldn't do that. But what you could do, though, is go up to it, press a button, and say, open Kindle, or start my latest audiobook, or resume my last Kindle read. And it would, rather than you having to press a button and slide and click and go down a menu, right, it would just instantly do whatever I was asking of it. And that's kind of what we're looking to provide, that contextual instant gratification of, I ask, I get, as opposed to me having to navigate to any degree. So these are all of our devices. This is the Echo thing that I've got right here. It does have a battery base just so I can carry it around, but that's an accessory. Some company made some money building accessories for Alexa. I invested. The Tap, that is the one that is portable and small, but why would I carry a small little Alexa traveling internationally? I didn't do that. And then I do have a couple dots with me, so I can show you guys those as well. But that's just to give you an idea. So this is just a little understanding of where we are with devices. This is the longer tail of what we're doing with Alexa. You can imagine Alexa pretty much on anything. And why can you do that? Because any company has the ability to leverage the Alexa APIs into their hardware. It's how I started at Alexa. I was a solutions architect for our Alexa voice service. Which meant I worked with companies that were building in-car entertainment or infotainment systems, that were building refrigerators, that were building televisions. Today, we currently have, you know, I say Alexa, we currently have a collection of these devices either in development with these partners or are already on the market, allowing you to integrate Alexa. We have, for example, of course, phones, apps are available that have Alexa built in. E-readers, our Kindles, are also available. Alarm clocks, well, I use my Dot. Fridges, I don't think we're there yet, but you can see where we're going, right? It could be in anything, and ultimately it's our Alexa Everywhere, or really Voice Everywhere methodology. So how does this happen? It happens through the Skills Kit. It's kind of the, you know, roll into the end, getting you— you're probably thinking to yourself, I am so excited, how do I start right now? I've opened my laptop, I'm ready to build a skill. If you're not, you will. Skills, meaning the apps that you build for Alexa, it's the one thing you can do today. Let's say you have a brand in mind, your own brand, or let's say you worked for a marketing agency or you work for a brand. What's one thing you could do right now that might be delightful for your customer? Try and think about it. I'm gonna answer the question, but think about what you might think. The customer will get a new way of interacting with your brand. Again, you might not even be providing a brand new flashy service, a brand new piece of functionality. It's something they might do every single day, but instead they get to do it with their voice. You'd be surprised how childlike people become when they realize that they can say something and it happens. Like I said, with my dad, I have my dad who is 70, ish, and my— I have 4 children, and my youngest 2 are like 2 years old. And so the same level of excitement occurs when we turn the lights on in our house with our voice. And we've been doing it for a couple years now, and still every time it's like, wow, that's so cool! And it is cool. But imagine, like, couldn't— that'd be amazing if you could provide that level of excitement even for the smallest thing to your customer. It's just that little thing. It creates a connection with your customer that they really can't get anywhere else. And like I said, it's pretty darn delightful. We're creating what are called voice-first apps. We say voice-first because, as I mentioned, we are doing multimodal. We are doing multimodal devices. So it's not just voice, but it should be voice-first because, like I said, you just don't get that level of delight with any other thing than just being able to say, hey, rather than go 3 levels down in a menu, can I just ask for that? And being able to accommodate those requests. So this is the Alexa app. It's actually old, I think, this image. It might be the one that's in the Kindle App Store. But we have an app on a phone. If you own a device, you would have this app, 'cause you need it in order to play. So in order to set up your first device, you have to set up a, um, an Alexa app, and this is how you configure it. I just did it in order to configure Alexa to work here. So this is what the store looks like. I didn't wanna be self-gratuitous and, like, have all of my apps on display up here. That would've been a little bit too much. Um, but lots of them to choose from, and I know most of these developers. I built many of the tutorials that we currently have to help you, so if you go out and Google how to build an app for Alexa, chances are if you're on Amazon's website and developer blog, you would find me. So you're welcome now, you and I, we're close friends. You can now email me or hit me up on the tweet-er. I would be happy to answer any questions that you have. And I totally do it. People, you'll know if you are in my Twitter circle, I'm super responsive. But this is how people find us, how they find your brand, You'll notice there's this kind of big banner. So every so often, if you have a really— if you create a relationship with Alexa, with our marketing team, they will actually feature you big time. I've never been featured that way, but it's just as meaningful to get featured in some of these smaller areas. It increases your utilization of your skill by like 900%. And I only— I'm speaking from experience on over 20 skills. At least 900%, sometimes even more. So it's nice to be able to get there. Again, you might ask, how do you get there if you're in with 16,000, 20,000 other skills? Well, we have one thing we're looking for, and that's customer satisfaction. So all of our top-rated skills get featured. You'll notice they all pretty much are in the 4s and 5s. Keep in mind, not a whole lot of the skills in the store have that because they didn't have some of your skill sets. I know this audience isn't totally UX people, but even some of these developers weren't even developers. We gave them a handheld GitHub repo and they just published something. So there's a lot of opportunity to even go to some of these skills and offer to assist them. So the framework that we use, we have Alexa Skills Kit for you to build skills for your brands. We have Alexa Voice Service. If you happen to have hardware associated, let's say you're building ear pods, or let's say you're building your own tablet, maybe. We tried the Fire Phone, so you could do that. Try to go into any hardware market. You can build Alexa into it. It'll instantly add a level of interestingness to it. The reason I say that is because we do lots of hackathons, thousands of them in a year. And almost always the one who wins has somehow integrated Alexa. Why? 'Cause it's just cool. Customers think it's cool. And being able to leverage that relatively easily without shifting any major active development in your organization, it might be a useful thing to think about. All right, so just some skills that you should think about when you're building, right? High value. So here's my super sneaky trick. I've built several brand-based skills. And what I did is I went into their websites, and you DevOps people might be able to help with this, went into the websites, identified the most popular click trails. What are the most popular things on a website or mobile app that people click through? Pick what, one, and then like get that working. Or in my case, I usually pick 10 'cause I like a challenge, like demoing live, right? Nobody really does that. But I do, right? So pick those top 10 click trails, things that people all the time go click, click, click to get to on your website. And I guarantee you, if you create an intent structure, or in other words, the ability for someone to execute that same request with one question to Alexa, they might be happy to do that. It might work out really well. It has worked out for me. So that's kind of my first and foremost kind of tip for building. But the other thing is think about all the different ways that someone would talk to Alexa. And I'll talk more about this in the— I'll talk more about this this afternoon in the panel. So I hope you'll join me if you're interested in this world. But there's a lot of work that goes into how do we make sure that if someone uses a slightly different phrase, Alexa doesn't fail. So your skills should evolve. Your users should be able to speak naturally. That's part of accommodating. The difference with this UX is that it's not like a button, and the button looks pretty much the same to everyone. Everyone talks differently, and you have to accommodate them all. It's not called computer intelligence, it's called artificial intelligence, right? And guess who does the artificialing? That'd be us, right? So we build what makes it look intelligent to the user. A developer does that work. So yay for us, jobs to come. I love security, but it's tough. It's tough work. So it's enjoyable and delightful, but it's not easy. So Alexa should understand most requests. Your certification testing process will ask you to test your skill, and they're not just saying, like, it works on my Alexa device, right? They're asking you to, like, build a beta program and have a bunch of users test it, because all those users should not get a script of what to read to Alexa. You should tell them what you want them to do and let them say it however they want. And I guarantee you, I was working with a financial firm, never knew that someone would use bucks in a transactional context on Alexa. But they do, like, "I want 20 bucks transferred to this account." Okay, so we added that. We ended up adding 2,700 variations on how to transfer money to different accounts. Skills should respond in an appropriate format. Really, if you're interested, if this, like, you're like, "Man, that sounds kinda cool," or you're super interested, but even if you're a little bit, you really should think about how to start with Alexa. We encourage a crawl, walk, run concept, right? We encourage you to go through the process of building an MVP. Anyone know what that means? What does that mean? Minimum viable product. But we don't like that because viable is not good in our Amazon customers, viable doesn't fly. So we call it minimum remarkable product. And that's why you go and figure out what did your data tell you about the most important things people want and build that. Build the minimum remarkable product. Build only one if you have to, but build one. And then add stuff over time. Like Daily Affirmation, I've evolved, I don't know, 100 times since it came out. I still have an average of 20,000 users a week, which I think is crazy. And it's mostly at lunchtime. Just so you know, your friends need some love at lunchtime. So it's just cool. We've got lots of metrics so you can decide how you're using and building your skills. But this is what we say. We say, really, start simple, find something meaningful, and build for that. And then just remember, you're not building for the screen anymore. So you actually have to talk to people. Aw. But that's okay. You could start by talking with me. I'll be out. We won't have a huge amount of time for questions. We're gonna open up for a couple, but I will definitely be here all day, coffee hour, and again after the panel this afternoon. So let's go ahead and, yeah, do the next.