6.2 Where Does Persona Come From?


Interaction with the speech application should suggest an underlying stable, coherent, and consistent personality. Specific personality traits of the desired persona will likely include helpfulness, competence, efficiency, friendliness, and likeability. Getting the right persona and getting the persona right depend on attention to a lot of language-related details in order for such traits to be inferred by the user.

It is a common misconception that persona design begins and ends by hiring someone with a pleasant voice, with little attention paid to what the user will actually hear in the context of an extended interaction. Prompts that sound artificial and mechanistic and dialogs that clunk along instead of flow will fail to evoke a well-designed, coherent persona. Instead, they will evoke the verbal equivalent of a company representative who dresses poorly or projects an awkward, undesirable image.

A prerequisite for projecting favorable personality traits has to do with the way messages are worded and dialogs are structured. Prompts and larger stretches of dialog must be modeled after the communication system that users are most familiar with, the system they began learning in infancy: everyday conversation. The alternative would be to subject VUI users to a less familiar system, such as an over-the-phone reading of questions and informational messages that typify the formal features and structures of written discourse. This is what we often find in traditional touchtone systems and is a legacy inherited by many VUIs. As we discuss in Chapter 10, however, written discourse is best suited for reading and is not ideal for ensuring listening comprehension, for which conversational discourse is ideal. Chapter 10 also explains how to apply basic characteristics of conversational language to the task of crafting prompts. Many of the ideas presented in that chapter are fundamental to the design of a voice persona because they are relevant to spoken language in general.

Linguistic distinctions among personae emerge from application-specific details, such as the age group, professional affiliation, or regional background of the typical user. They also derive from decisions about "who the persona is" vis-à-vis the user in terms of social roles for example, an assistant talking to a boss, a librarian to a researcher, a tour guide to a visitor, a teacher to a student, and so on. Such differences in social dynamics imply differences in word choice and sentence structure, as discussed in section 10.5.

Another way to differentiate one persona from another is by using different dialog strategies. For example, whereas one persona might rely on implicit confirmations (e.g., "How many shares of IBM do you want to buy?"), another might instead employ explicit confirmations ("You want to buy IBM is that correct?"). The following section reviews basic guidelines that will assist you in making such decisions.

Prosody the intonation, stress, grouping, and rhythm of stretches of speech is also an essential and systematic component of conversational language. Just as a persona cannot be supported or instantiated by prompts whose wording typifies written text, neither can it be supported or instantiated by messages that do not conform to basic principles of prosody, as is frequently the case with concatenated prompts. Prosody in VUI design is the theme of Chapter 11.

Finally, the perception of the persona you design is also affected by certain decisions relating to the design of the call flow and even by your design methodology. For example, in Chapter 8 you will see a case in which the perception of basic linguistic intelligence depends on reentering a particular dialog state with a novel prompt ("Sorry about that, what's the correct amount?"). If a different design is used, the caller, upon reentry to the state in question, might hear exactly the same prompt that was played the first time through ("How much would you like to pay?"). In the context of an actual interaction with the system, this design choice yields a conversationally inept persona. From the point of view of the caller, the wording of the message upon reentry suggests that the system is not keeping track of the conversation, at least not as a human would, or is experiencing short-term memory loss. Chapter 8 presents a prompt design methodology that will help you avoid such pitfalls.



Voice User Interface Design 2004
Voice User Interface Design 2004
ISBN: 321185765
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 117

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