So Amazon launched Echo, and it\u2019s really wowed the world\u2026 or not. Since then, we\u2019ve seen the launch of Google Home, and Apple\u2019s HomeKit. But, like the wearables market, the sales haven\u2019t matched the hype. Well, at least this seems to be the prevailing opinion, but is it true?
\nWell kind of. But that\u2019s not necessarily a bad thing. According to New York-based consulting firm Activate Inc, sales of Echo are \u2018in-line with those of the original iPhone\u2019. The key to iPhone was the success of Apps. Sure, we went through that terrible phase of trying every App we found, and that resulted in some truly awful experiences. But the market matured incredibly quickly, and Apple sorted out their App development and approval process.
\nWhile Echo and Google Home both have obvious service bias, that doesn\u2019t have to stay the case, and indeed both companies are encouraging developers to see what they can do with the platforms in order to create compelling use cases.
\nAt Splendid, we\u2019ve been getting down \u2018n dirty with Alexa for a while, and recently put together a demo for our Group\u2019s Tech Expo, hosted in our London HQ. The Expo was themed \u2018The Future of Retail\u2019; therefore, we needed to think retail, but Echo already does that, with arguably the largest retailer in the world. So what better challenge?
\nThe Institute of Grocery Distribution tells us that the UK grocery market will be worth \u00a3203bn by 2019, and we believe that the grocers who provide not only best value but best experience and choice are the ones that will triumph in the war for our baskets. We know that customers want choice, and people don\u2019t like to feel they are \u2018forced\u2019 to buy everything through one retailer, which is likely to be a perception Amazon face with Echo.
\nWe decided to create a fictional Grocery store, Splendid Grocery, to see what challenges there are with voice interaction in everyday situations, and what we could do about them.
\nSo, what did we do? We\u2019re not an international supermarket with access to a vast product catalogue; luckily Tesco has an open API giving us access to their whole product database, complete with product shots and pricing.
\nFrom there the development was run in three streams. With only one developer in each, one concentrated on building the VUI (the Voice User Interface because that\u2019s what it amounts to) and ensured that Alexa (Amazon\u2019s AI) stood the best chance of understanding what the user was asking for, and what they expected her to do about it. This involved creating utterances (lots of versions of phrases) and intents, which is what the user is expecting Alexa to do. These form your app interaction model \u2013 and in keeping with the AI nature of Alexa, apps are called Skills.
\nJust think, a user who wanted to know where their delivery is might say \u2018Alexa, ask Splendid where\u2019s my stuff\u2019, or \u2018Alexa, ask Splendid where my order is\u2019 \u2013 you get the picture.
\nThe second work stream concentrated on building a service that Alexa would communicate with, which integrated with Tesco\u2019s API providing product information, such as pricing and product photography. Alexa would pass across the product information the user had said, and would also let the service know what the user\u2019s intent was (for example, add {product} to my order).
\nWe now had a working demo of a voice UI, which would handle key user intents, such as adding products to a basket, place a fictional order, check delivery dates and check stock in their local store.
\nHowever, we felt we were missing something. We knew voice would not replace other interfaces, but augment them, and that wasn\u2019t getting across. So, we had a third developer build a responsive basket for the shop which showed the orders being added to the basket as the user spoke to Alexa. When a user placed an order \u2013 \u2018Alexa, ask Splendid to order my products\u2019 \u2013 the basket page became empty, and the user could see their order appear in their order history page.
\nAlexa demo video stillPlay
\nThrough our explorations we quickly realised that a user, unless they are particularly determined, is unlikely to build up a weekly shop one product at a time. But they might add items ad-hoc throughout the day such as running out of toothpaste in the morning and saying, \u2018Alexa, ask Splendid to add toothpaste to my order\u2019. Or they may have a weekly shop set-up and simply say, \u2018Alexa, ask Splendid to re-order my weekly shop\u2019.
\nThroughout the Expo the prototype generated a lot of interest from both retailers and industry experts; the wariness was palpable. So what is it that\u2019s making people uncomfortable? Well, for a start, choice. It\u2019s hard to pick exactly the right packet of pasta when having them read out to you by a robot, and it\u2019s more time consuming than tapping on a screen. Data can be a huge help here \u2014 if you know they always order Pilgrims Choice Mature Cheddar, next time they ask for cheddar you can make an educated guess as to what they want.
\nHowever, the fact is that a taxonomy which works for devices doesn\u2019t necessarily work for voice. So we need to work hard on creating a taxonomy layer which effectively translates hierarchical choices we\u2019ve become trained to make, and convert them back into much more natural, conversational experiences.
\nThere\u2019s also the privacy issue. As Echo has the concept of a single account, you might not want your kids\/wife\/husband\/flatmates to know you\u2019ve ordered Imodium. And the individuality issue goes a little deeper: think about prescriptions. Placing an order requires authentication of who the person is, to ensure we don\u2019t make potentially deadly mistakes (although we have a hypothesis we\u2019ll be testing out around accounts and security).
\nBut none of these problems are insurmountable. And in fact, some of them go away when we apply voice as an augmentation of existing experiences. Within your Ocado app, imagine if you could ask Siri to \u2018buy me apples, cheddar, and some water\u2019 (Apple, in iOS 10, have opened Siri up to app developers through their SiriKit) and through being intrinsically linked to your account it knows your preferred brands, sizes and flavours. So, no need to filter. Again, single account linking, as is the model of almost all online shopping experiences, gets us around the prescription issue by inherently knowing who we are talking to. There are definitely solutions out there, we just need to be open to voice interactions to explore them.
\nConsumers are becoming more and more comfortable with voice interaction, and according to a very interesting lady we met at the Expo who had carried out some research, the vast majority of people surveyed who have Amazon Echos found that their use of voice interactions with other tools, such as Siri, increased (which many had not used before).
\nThere are many other areas where voice could help \u2014 consider people who struggle to use today\u2019s many buttoned TV or DVD controllers. How much easier to say \u2018Alexa, ask Sony to put Channel 4 on\u2019. Or in pharma, \u2018Dave, you are due to re-order your repeat prescription, would you like me to order it for you?\u2019
\nThere are many sectors which could benefit from exploring what they can do with voice to better serve their customers. Our voice prototype work in the energy sector is also gathering steam (not literally), and currently allows home control apps to connect to Echo without the need for additional proprietary hardware, and again it works through an API from a very large UK energy provider… a demo that will be forthcoming in the next couple of weeks, stay tuned.
\nAnd in the meantime, get in touch and chat to us about what Voice could mean for you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So Amazon launched Echo, and it\u2019s really wowed the world\u2026 or not. Since then, we\u2019ve seen the launch of Google Home, and Apple\u2019s HomeKit. But, like the wearables market, the sales haven\u2019t matched the hype. Well, at least this seems to be the prevailing opinion, but is it true? Well kind of. But that\u2019s not…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":136,"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions\/136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}