Challenge

Microsoft is coming out with a voice assistant smart TV. Linda is Microsoft’s intelligent personal digital assistant using voice command technology to provide day-to-day assistance and ease across all devices, it helps you achieve more tasks with intuitive interaction. Linda TV implements Microsoft voice technology and Interface designs that will enhance user’s experience and convenience.

Time:

Team:

Skills:

Tools:

Summer 2020

Individual

Design Thinking, UX Research, UI/UX, Voice User Interface Design, Layout Design, Motion Design

Adobe Creative Suite

How might we offer many options for users to seamlessly interact with the voice assistant? What features would be most needed by users to interact with this new smart TV?

The graph shows the estimated number of smart device users in the world and it forecasts it will grow about 40% to 60% in the next 2-3 years.

Research

​​Survey regarding How frequently people use voice assistants for different tasks on a daily and monthly basis.

Reasons for Why they are unsatisfied with the voice assistant of phones and devices.

Using keywords like smart TV, Voice Assistant, and comfortable Interaction helped me to focus on how voice assistants work and what techniques they use to create smooth interaction.

The research survey shows Voice Assistant comprehension capability, tested by different people with different accents and with different devices. This helped me understand the techniques they use to provide comfortable voice interaction.

- Many Voice Assistant uses accent libraries.

- Voice Assistant uses algorithms to identify and acknowledge the language and accent used by users and activate itself in a different language mode to read the request and answer back.

By using the same techniques, Linda provides friendly, personable interaction.

By Interviewing many people, combined their goals to create a Persona that helped discover users’ needs and frustration and helped to build user stories.

Persona

User Stories

I am going out for essential grocery shopping and my kids watch cartoons at home. I want to be sure that whether they watch cartoons. And do need some control to play, and pause the video even though I am 5 miles away from my home.

I don’t like to see a slow-speaking chef’s face for 15 min - just for a recipe. I want to speed up my video.

I am irritated by talking to my voice assistant in a ‘robotic way’. I want the assistant to understand my voice accent, tone, and sometimes slang as well.

Microsoft Cortana is a synthetic intelligence character in Microsoft's Halo Combat video game. Similarly, Linda is another character from the same video game. A skilled soldier in highly classified operations succeeds the missions with flexibility and gracefulness.

Linda learns through their network of established users how to provide the richest experience, right out of the box. Moreover, it reduces the complexity of multiple services and subscriptions and provides a standard, trustworthy individual interface.

Brand Strategy

Voice Flow Chart

The Voice flowchart depicts the outlines of an interactive voice response system deployed by the user. As the system is started, it first authenticates the authorized user, then the voice assistant is on running in the background listening for available voice commands; once the user gives a command, it gives the necessary output. This output is sent to Speech Recognition which converts the speech into machine-readable form. Based on the input received the personal voice assistant then performs the desired task.

For onboarding, Linda makes the process short and gets essential data through connected resources. The process complete by connecting the app and TV to help the user set up their TV and make the onboarding process easier. Linda recommends creating a voice profile so, in the future, it can recognize the user’s voice easier. In order to do that, it provides difficult to pronounce English words to read out loud so Linda can capture the user’s speech pattern and tone. It learns through the user's voice and tone and begins to communicate. Linda prefers that users should use their sensitive data like passwords, payment methods in a mobile app to diminish the chances of misuse.

Onboarding

Mobile Solution

Linda goes beyond entertainment and visual communication. Users can play recipe videos and share the same video link immediately to friends with multiple social apps with the help of Linda Smart TV. For parental control, Linda can protect children from harmful content and set a time limit. Moreover, It can understand your voice tone and slang and appropriately respond to you.

TV User Interface and Interaction

Introducing Linda tv in a friendly, enjoyable way and with well-chosen content helps users to understand the product and built their trust. After several rounds of user testing and iterations, I ensured It maintains a balance between functionality and aesthetics so it is simple to use and adapt, and intuitive even with the kids. Interaction between tv and the user is friendly and tried to make natural to increase product use.

Usability Test

I have been aware of voice assistant products but research helped me to solve some problems to make it efficient, such as how can I use slang in the voice flows and how to control tv from the distance, using an app remote would be easy to add updates in the future. The overall problem itself is challenging but I enjoyed the process and learned voice engineering study to make the product convenient.

Conclusion

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