AiC Episode 79

In this episode, Teri welcomes Brooke Hawkins, a senior voice user interface designer, voice technology ethicist, and speaker.

Welcome, Brooke Hawkins!

Brooke has a tremendous background in voice user interface design and has become a thought leader on the ethical implications of artificial intelligence and voice technology. She comes on to the show to talk about all the ethics surrounding the development of voice applications for a future of living in a voice interface mediated world.

Background

  • She has been in the voice space for all of her career as a UX designer.
  • Started out working for a health technology company. The voice ecosystem blew up when she was there and she ended up taking a role at Nuance Communications working on chatbot solutions for companies.
  • She has had experience working with both startups and corporate giants.
  • She now works for SmartAisle, a small startup in Detroit, designing an interactive voice-first retail applications, specifically for shopping in stores. This product will generally consist of a smart speaker with Alexa or Google Assistant talking to shoppers and recommending products to them.

Becoming a Voice Ethicist

  • She has used her many years of experience in different voice technology-oriented industries to look into the ethical problems that face the voice-first field.

Voice Ethics in Healthcare and other Verticals

  • In the healthcare space, voice ethics came into play when they were designing IVR calls. They had a lot of personalized information about the patients they were calling. They could design their calls to be as personal as possible (e.g. address the patients by their names) to convince the patients that they were not receiving “robo-calls” and that they were personalized to them. They took a lot of ethical considerations into account there.
  • In the marketing space, a lot of the same challenges apply. Marketing technology is becoming more sophisticated, partnering voice experiences with facial recognition tools and cameras. There are companies working on smart marketing where they evaluate a person’s gender, race, and other things, in order to provide them with a more customized shopping experience.
  • She sees a need in educating voice designers on ethical principles so that ethics can be something that is infused in voice design processes much higher up in sales or business development.

Voice Ethics with Brooke Hawkins

Companies Embracing the Ethical Side of Voice Technology

  • A few companies are concerned about it, but it’s a relatively new field. Brooke is very interested in writing about it so that companies can have access to resourceful content about implementing ethics in their voice design processes.

Cases of Pushback from Consumers

  • An example is a pilot Google did in the marketing space where they piloted automated advertisement voice coupons that would come up in people’s voice devices, and trigger an interactive coupon that a person could use at a particular retailer. The feedback for that was very negative. Google pulled those coupons almost immediately, and are now researching how they could launch that in the future.
  • Users may not necessarily want to hear advertisements on their voice devices. They are becoming more savvy about what they do and do not want to hear via voice devices.

The Mars Agency

  • They are educating and working with retailers to come up with innovative and useful ways that they can engage with shoppers via voice.
  • There are some betas that Alexa and Google offer to different companies to launch voice apps, and the Mars Agency works with them to advise those companies on a development cycle that includes a lot of learning and research built in.
  • They advise companies to start small while collecting a lot of research and data. They can then determine which practises are effective and then infuse those insights moving forward so they can ensure that they don’t put out voice apps that users will hate.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

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