Phonetic Design — Unlock the Potential
Is your naming inclusive? Think twice, people might not bother to take the effort.
Human beings are lazy beings, homo lazycus, we say in Latin. If there is a way to save energy — human beings will go it. Did you know some people with both devices at home use Alexa more than Google Assitant because “A-le-xa” costs less effort to pronounce than “O-key, Goo-gle”?
The latter has like one syllable more to spell plus a “gl” to choke on (TWO CONSONANTS ARE YOU KIDDING ME, gogo?) Ain’t nobody got time for that, right?
I recall the lady at the early days of the GogoAssistant, she knew it already. I can’t help myself, watch this video and learn the first conversational user interface designer commandment: Thou shall not force users to adapt, but the other way round.
If they would have asked me…
I would have named it “mh mh” — because I find that easiest. I don’t even have to open my mouth for it — and still there is some phonetic spectrum, right? You can “mh mh” like a 🐼 -🐱 — 🐟 — 🐝 — or even “📱” “ 📱” (just the sound of a vibrating phone on a table.) Who said humans could not emit that sound?
Any other ideas?
Speaking of ideas — I have seen especially English native speakers pronouncing the word “idea” like “I deer” as if there was an -er at the end.
I can understand an English native speaker’s phonetic spectrum might be constrained and they might not be used to have a word ending which is rather typical for romance languages. (I do have my constraints as well, when it comes to tone pitch languages such as Vietnamese, I get that.)
But ok. They haven’t asked me. And you can do with your speechmuscles whatever floats your boat or your tongue, hereby I am giving you my official permit for that.
I took my learning and am making my life easier as well and chill. I won’t bother anymore to pronounce more consonants in a row than absolutely necessary.
From now on I will say Gogo instead of Google and — please keep your fingers crossed — that the Gogo Assistant I am using won’t let me down and will be trained for that and it will understand at first invocation because I won’t repeat myself, nope. I won’t repeat myself. Also I am claiming the right not to say “Ok Gogo” at the invocation because sometimes it is not ok. I am not always in the situation where it is ok and I feel like saying that. Are you?
Pragmatically speaking, “ok” is an acknowledgement — of what, gogo? What do you want me to acknowledge here? I am just starting a conversation with you. This is either paradox or intrusive (pick a button),
(zero f*** and just two buttons given, yes let’s turn this thing around and frame back). Forcing me to say “ok” at the beginning is a bit as if we would have been talking to eachother before that invocation. But we haven’t. We are just starting this conversation.
Give me love (= claps) if you want to continue.
#voicepeople!
#alexa #gogoassistant
