VOICE Round-Up: Adva Levin on building award-winning, voice-driven games for kids

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It's Machine Yearning from Assist. It's a podcast where we think and dream about the future of AI, the talking internet, and how we're reshaping our culture. This chapter is an excerpt from our interview with Advait Levin at the 2018 VOICE Summit. the largest gathering in the conversational technology world. Adva is one of the many folks we interviewed, people who are thriving at the front edge of brand, UX, research, and design. Adva is a pioneer in voice-driven children's game development. Her shop, Pretzel Labs, creates voice-first games like Kids Court, where an Alexa-based judge settles kids' fights. Kids Court won the grand prize in the Alexa Kids Skill Challenge. Adva is pushing out into new territory, where we can see how empathetic, useful products can be educational, reduce screen time, and according to the users we've polled, be damn fun too. This is just a taste, so make sure you grab the full episode and subscribe so you never miss a single Machine Yearning. Aatva Levin.

Let's really dig into persona because I think that's so critical as a doorway into all of this. You know, what do you want to make sure people understand about persona? Because it's a really— it's like you can scratch the surface of it and get it right away, but it goes very, very deep.

So like the way we start thinking about like defining a new persona when we do a new project is there is the elements that will be communicated to the user and then there are elements that are just used internally to help create consistent character. So, you know, you could think of like, is it a male or female voice? What sort of age, background, and style they would be reflecting? And a good way to think of it is even to think of someone you know, someone in your life or celebrity, or just to sort of ground yourself as a writer on a specific character so you can write a consistent personality. And then basically what gets communicated to the user is the dialogue. So they may not know that, you know, I wrote the character of a 25-year-old girl from New York, but they are hearing what she has to say. Like we're looking into, you know, things like how would our persona welcome a new user. I just did a workshop about this here 2 days ago where we did like a skill to book a hotel room. And it was really fascinating because I wanted all the participants to come up with a sort of creative sort of hotel. And to communicate the persona, the voice of that hotel, just by writing that side of the skill, not the user side. I mean, if you think about it, they only wrote like 5 lines of text. And we had them act it out. And how different can you get with 5 lines of text of writing a hotel? It was amazing. It was such a huge variety. And you could really understand what they were going to do when they just acted it out.

This is the thing that I don't think people understand, the degree to which this new space is bringing both character in that sort of very formal dramaturgical sense, you know, with what you experience and then the backstory that an actor creates, with brand and brand voice and brand narrative. And this is like a level of merging the two at a higher level.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, we've seen that sort of like, you know, even when you write the copy for a website for a brand, there is a lot of discussion of voice and tone and like the right sort of, uh, way to communicate the brand's voice. But now it's literally the brand's voice, and it has to be way more exact and accurate. And, um, basically like the way I try to think of it is if this service or app or game, um, would have been something in real life, who would you hire to be like the front person of your service.

And you do have to hire actors. You do have to coach and direct them.

Yeah, so I think for some use cases you would hire voice actors. For some, it would be right to do like a text-to-speech service, which we also somewhat direct by using SSML, which is the markup language for text-to-speech. We have some control, and it is a bit like directing an actor. Pause here, put more emphasis on this word. A lot of my work is basically running through one line of dialogue 20 times through Amazon Polly until it sounds right.

That's what a director does.

Yeah, I suppose I'm a robot director now.

That's a good t-shirt waiting to happen.

Yeah.

What does that feel like after being sort of developing as a writer?

Well, I wasn't really working professionally as a writer. I was always working for startups. But I think the big change is that this field is so new that I feel like I am really inventing my path. And there aren't really that many use cases or textbook cases that you can learn a lot from. And basically everyone is sort of inventing everything as we go forward, which gets me super excited.

Yeah.

Let's talk about the iteration of Kids Court. Like, when did you start thinking that this was the— let's just talk us through like sort of the development of the idea. How did you get into it and move through it?

So I brought Alexa to my home and I saw how the kids are like treating her as a sort of person. I wanna say not a real person, but it felt like we have a new person in the house. And like the first question that came to mind was, okay, we have someone new in the house. What can we use her for? Like what can she help us do? And I really map, try to map out all the sort of friction points between kids and parents, siblings, and I'm like, okay, kids fighting, that is a thing in every family. And I just thought about it a lot and I said, okay, I mean, it doesn't really matter when they fight whose fault it is. What matters to them is they want to be heard and they want to get more attention at that point. I mean, usually it doesn't matter if your sibling stole your sweatshirt, it just matters that, you know, they got into your space and you feel left out. So, like, okay, maybe Alexa can help us with this, to sort of make them feel heard and turn it into a playful experience and to make them have fun and just forget about why they had a fight in the first place.

The ultimate redirection.

Yes.

I'd just like to hear your thinking about, you know, the implications of moving the on-ramp to the internet from sort of 8 or 9, from the sort of the, when you have sort of language and composition and typing and text and reading, down to 2, 3, 4, because now with voice, the on-ramp has moved down there.

I'm not sure it has moved down there. From what I can see, like Alexa's not very good at recognizing voices for kids that are that young. So I mean, my 2-year-old can get Alexa to play music, but if it gets into like more complicated interactions, it becomes frustrating for her. And additionally, like, I think at that age, like 2 to 4 or even 5, they are better at maybe consuming content by voice, but not so much interacting with it in a complicated way. So like basically when you do like this voice interaction, you're designing a script and that script has to be followed by the user. In a way. So I think the good design practices get the user to sort of answer the script without telling them what they have to say. But I wouldn't say, "Hey, do you want blue, red, or white?" I would ask, "What color do you want to pick?" And I would sort of navigate it in a way that they know what to say, but I'm not telling them, "Say this and that." And with the age group of 4-year-olds, It was so challenging because they know the answer, but their mind works in such a creative and, like, sprawled way, I guess, that— so they would say blue, and then instead of, like, waiting for Alexa to respond, they would say, "And what's your favorite color, Alexa?" Which is something that it's really hard to design for because that is one example, but it's all over the place. So my experience has been, like, for that age group to do very simple interactions. For now, but things are changing all the time. That age group wants to interact. It's not working well right now, but it will be, and they want it, and they are super good users.

That's great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening, and we hope you'll take a second and share this episode with other members of your team. And make sure you check out the other chapters from this week's episode. We have an interview with Patricia Scanlon, who is doing amazing work deploying deep learning to build mammoth datasets that enable speech recognition of children. Actually, make it easy on yourself. Just subscribe so you never miss an episode or a chapter. That way you can be the first to stay on top of this field and help shape the conversation at your company. Get in touch on Twitter. @assist. DMs are open. We're super interested to hear who you think should appear on the podcast. Machine Yearning is made by Paul Ciuffo and Michael Alsesser for Limina House. Have a great day.