It was a Sunday morning, and I was watering the front yard. To time the watering, I had a timer running on my Echo Show.

But I was preempted with another task, and I didn’t want to leave the timer running and going off if no one was going to be around anyways, so I went towards my Echo Show to cancel the timer, and from afar I said: “Alexa, stop th…” As I was saying those words, Alexa immediately interrupted me, saying “I’m having trouble connecting, I will keep trying”.

A generic message, with a generic tone, and a generic pitch, that for whatever reason, when combined with the interruption, kind of sounded as if Alexa was annoyed, as in “Don’t ask me now! Don’t you see that I’m trying?” Moody Alexa…

As the Voice War continues and expands with more advanced, complex and smart software, it is perhaps personality that is unique to you (personalized) given your context at a given point in time, that uses the proper tones and pitches and timing, and “umms…”, what will really declare the winner of the voice war between Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the many startups in this space. The winner takes it all.

Back to Alexa, an easy fix to the problem could be to delay the interruption until the speaker pauses. Also include better etiquette when there is no choice but interrupting, such as “I’m sorry for interrupting, but…”.

-ceo

 

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