Alexa, Tell Me a Story About the Future
By: Adam Simon
Tags: Messaging, Advertising, Conversational UI

Alexa, Tell Me a Story About the Future

Conversational UIs & How They Change Brand Exposure

Cortana, Microsoft’s voice interface, takes her name from an AI character in the Halo videogames

There’s a popular trend in user interfaces, one which some companies are spending billions of dollars building, and some are leveraging to minimize their costs. It’s intuitive and anticipatory, hiding a mess of search results behind a single blessed response. But every product or service has an interface, and behind that interface is code that defines how the interface responds to user input. Except, in this case, sometimes it’s humans behind the interface. For now.

Conversational UIs just make sense: why learn to navigate a website or an app when you can just ask for what you want? Whether you’re talking to Siri or Alexa, cc’ing Amy, texting Stefan, or messaging M, isn’t it easier to just ask for what you want? Having computers understand us on our terms, instead of us confroming to theirs, has been a holy grail of computing since the beginning, and in the next few years the tide will finally shift to the former. It encompasses everything from the voice-powered interfaces from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, to Facebook’s text-based M, Slack’s automated bots, and a myriad of startups, including SoundHound, Pana, Magic, x.ai, even Invisible Girlfriend/Boyfriend.

At the IPG Media Lab, we think of conversational UIs as anything that lets you input natural language, regardless of whether that interface uses voice or text, and regardless of whether that text arrives via SMS, messenger service, or email. (I’m still waiting for handwritten input via post, but it’s early days.) On the backend, it can be powered by software, humans, or some blend of both. To the user, it looks like AI either way, but the smart use of humans can often make services more responsive than what can be achieved with AI alone. For example, Facebook’s M will respond to any request, no matter how obscure, giving it a lot more breadth than Siri or Google Now can manage with pure software.

In the short term, using humans to fill in the gaps is a smart way to offer a full-service app. And just as Uber will eventually replace its drivers with autonomous cars, it’s easy to see how Facebook will automate away the most popular queries of M, sending only the most fringe requests to humans to parse. Similarly, it’s easy to see services which are text-based today adding a voice option, or vice-versa. Just as young children today think that screens they can’t touch are broken, so, too, will the children of 2020, about objects they can’t talk to.

There are many reasons why conversational UIs are exploding in popularity right now, but an important factor is our burgeoning IoT, and the post-app interfaces that they require. Websites were convenient ways to get information to users, and apps are perfect interfaces for many services. But we’re beginning to witness the unbundling of apps into their component pieces, which will allow the system to reach in and retrieve the pieces it needs. And the result of that indexing allows the same services to become available via new form factors, sometimes without screens or keyboards.

Conversational UIs present a fundamental shift in how brands relate to their existing customers, and how they find new customers. Facebook is pitching Messenger as a key customer service platform, and it would be a boon to consumers to see brands embrace it. But whether it’s texted or spoken, your brand will quite literally have a voice, powered by some combination of humans and software. It’s time to start thinking about how funny, flirty, or sarcastic you want that voice to be. When confused, Siri makes jokes, Google remains silent, and M summons a human. How will your brand react?

Alexa, currently embodied in Amazon’s Echo, and Pana, the text-based travel agent, offer a glimpse at what brand integration into third party platforms may look like. Rather than Amazon’s exhaustive catalog, if you search for a product to buy, Alexa only offers up previous purchases, encouraging brand loyalty in the name of simplicity. And Pana only offers one option for a flight or hotel at a time, hand-curated by a human. If a search resulted only in one response, how would your brand respond? You could buy your way into being the default response, for a hefty sum, if available. Or you could ramp up brand advertising, so a user asks for you by name. Would you try to influence the curators, as well? Should you?