Voice Assistants Are Only Intuitive If You’re Already Tech Savvy

Posted April 16, 2018

External Article: How-To-Geek

Ian Bogost, professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology, was quoted in the How-To-Geek, April 16, article, “Voice Assistants Are Only Intuitive If You’re Already Tech Savvy.”  The School of Literature, Media, and Communication is part of the Georgia Tech Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Excerpt:

It’s easy to confuse “familiar” with “intuitive.” This applies to voice interfaces as much as it does to desktop ones. Tech savvy people think of Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant as easy-to-use, because we’re used to using search engines and know to employ similar language when asking a question out loud. For people who haven’t used search engines, however, it can be hard to wrap your head around this. Ian Bogost (Georgia Tech), writing for The Atlantic, talks about watching his 82 year old father, who has been blind most of his life, try to use the Amazon Echo. His dad is frustrated when Alexa won’t respond to the nickname “Lexi.”

For the full article, visit the How-To-Geek website.