Project 1
Process
Week 1: Research
Full research documentation is here
History
https://canasstech.com/blogs/news/virtual-assistants-to-google-or-not-to-google
What is a virtual assistant?
Virtual assistant is defined as a “software agent that is capable of performing tasks or providing services to a user”
Poll in May 2017 revealed that mostly widely used 34% used Apple’s Siri, 19% used Google Assistant, 6% used Amazon’s Alexa, and 4% used Microsoft Cortana
Proliferation of smartphones prompted idea of mass consumer virtual assistants
First modern virtual assistant was Siri, released on iPhone 4S in October 2011
How do they work?
Virtual assistants work through both voice recognition and text interfacing (chat)
VA use ‘natural language processing’ (NLP) to convert text/voice input into commands, in addition to machine learning
Activating a VA usually involves a key word or phrase known as a “wake word;” examples of this include “Alexa” or “Ok Google”
What can they do?
VA have a variety of functions which include:
Provider information like weather, news, traffic
Make lists, create appointments, set alarms or reminders
Play music from Spotify, Google Play, Apple Music
Read audiobooks
Play shows or movies on television
Make phone calls
How much do they cost?
Google Home and Amazon Echo are between $99 and $129 US while while Apple’s HomePod is nearly $350 US; Google Home Mini and Amazon Echo Dot are cheaper at about $79
Privacy Issues
• Consumer paranoia regarding the fact that smart speakers are always listening to them; recorded clip of voice command is sent to cloud and presumably stored in a server somewhere; user has ability to see which voice clips have been stored and can choose to delete cache of voice commands; devices also come with ‘mute’ buttons that prevents them from hearing anything
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36334131/clippy-to-allo-a-history-of-virtual-assistants
Siri was first virtual assistant built into phone
Could send emails, text messages, make appointments and search information online by voice commands
Amazon launched smart assistant, Alexa in 2014
Difference was that it was now implemented in a stand-alone speaker instead of in the phone
Google released Google Home in 2016
Rough Sketches
This is my initial rough storyboard for the flow of the information on the website.
These are some illustrations I created to emphasize the narrative aspect of the website.
Week 3: Finalizing Prototype
Here are a couple of screengrabs I took of my high fidelity wireframes as I was finalizing the prototype.
Week 4: Troubleshooting
For the past few weeks I was trying to code the website based off the prototype I created in Sketch but I was encountering so many setbacks that I felt that it wasn’t worth the trouble to continue so I decided to just submit the website as a prototype in InVision. The biggest challenges I had with the code was trying to make the Google Charts fit properly with the rest of the content but most of the time it would start overlapping or glitching. Another challenge was trying to find a good timeline with .js code but unfortunately every time I tried plugging it into my html, it would disrupt the entire code.