CS 510 Spoken Language Interfaces
Assignment 4: GeneraList

Michael Lane

mikelane@gmail.com

Report

Developer's Point of View

Lane:
This app takes our 3rd project to an entirely new level; and yet, this can only be considered a proof-of-concept at this point. What this does well is allows the user to navigate through the list, forward, backward, peeking, reviewing, etc. What it does not do so well is creating or editing a list via voice. But once I got to a point that I could actually edit the lists using the voice app, I realized just how tedious that is. This app would really shine with an associated web and/or mobile interface for modifying the lists. The good news is that this shouldn't be difficult to add (the back end is basically set up as is). The bad news is that the primary voice application had to come first and there just wasn't time. So what I've done is to create the lists by hand using the aws dynamodb web editor. It's sufficient for our needs.

It was a stretch goal to get a proof-of-concept for other kinds of lists (playlists, video lists, slide shows, etc). This would take a bit of rejiggering with the middleware, since it is optimized for reading out text right now, and an additional web service that handles the assembly and presentation of these kinds of lists. I have no doubt that I could get to that point (and I may very well in my personal time). But there was no time for that for class.

User's Point of View

Lane:
Alexa is nice to develop for and it is a great platform, but user testing is very difficult. There wasn't a way that I could find to make it so Nandini could allow users to test on the Echo. I had two users for the system. One user said she liked the navigation, but she wished it could skip over more than one item in the list. She was fond of the ability to peek at the next instruction without going to it and the ability to remind herself of the current list item. The other user felt like it was difficult to create and edit the lists. Telling it long instructions often does not work since the device stops listening after a bit. Both users felt like the robotic voice was a bit too distracting for longer instructions.

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