DOUG SCHUMACHER

experience designer + writer

UX

Launch: UXing. Content analysis of tweets with ‘#UX’

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UXers, meet UXing. 

UXing is an app that analyzes tweets with the hashtag ‘#ux’.

Now of course, you can’t have Twitter content analysis without a dashboard, so there’s one of those. A topline breakout of the key metrics behind the broad trends.

The data is charted in a Google Looker (nee Data) Studio report.

After the initial dashboard view, it breaks down the analysis to answer 3 primary questions. 
1. What are the influncers tweeting about? 
2. Who’s doing the tweeting? 
3. When is it happening? 

That’s a simplification, as there are quite a few charts and tables designed around each of those questions.

For example, a word cloud featuring the topics most frequently posted helps answer the question ‘What are the influencers tweeting about’.

Likewise, a table ranking the content authors by total retweets generated during the given time period takes the question of ‘Who’s doing the tweeting’ and adds a value metric to rank them by.

The question ‘When is it happening’ is interesting from multiple views, including the dayparts with the most active authors.

In future posts, I’ll share charts that I think add interesting POV to the industry conversation and discuss how they work to answer the 3 main questions.

Meanwhile, the report is live, so please check it out. 
https://datastudio.google.com/s/q3EifGqrEvM 

If you have questions, thoughts on the analysis, or ideas about what else could be gathered from the data, I’m curious to hear more.

Filed Under: UX Tagged With:

Your Brand Has a Personality Whether You Like it or Not. Here’s How to Define It.

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Note: This article originally appeared in Voicebot.ai on April 4, 2020

Pay attention, mortal meatbot, and you might learn something about voice personality in this article. Or, maybe a better opening line would be, Are you interested in learning how to use voice personality to increase the effectiveness of your voice apps?

Or maybe not.

The point is, there are different ways to deliver a message. The style you choose will likely impact your message’s effectiveness. And that’s the point of a voice personality methodology. To hopefully nail the optimal voice for your brand.

YOU CANNOT NOT COMMUNICATE

The line above is from influential graphic designer David Carson. It’s a simple concept. Whatever font, imagery, or layout you use to represent your brand, it will make a statement about the identity and values of the company behind the message. Those who think they can hug the middle of the road attempting to avoid standing out can come across as bland and generic. And of course, bland and generic can be ways to describe a personality. Just not terms most brands are likely to aspire to.

The spoken word adheres to the same communication principle. Clifford Nass, a former Stanford professor of Communications who did extensive research on the impact of various voice personality traits, said that within seconds of a human hearing a voice, we begin to assign all sorts of personality traits to it. Whatever voice it is. However nondescript we may think it is. To demonstrate this, below are 2 human voice-over reads for the same script. Even with the bland, generic script used in those reads, listen to the two voices and note how your mind conjures different personas for each.

AUDIO SFX: S1VO1
Credit: Patrick Lagreid at Voices.com (LINK: https://www.voices.com/actors/plagreid)
AUDIO SFX: S1VO2
Credit: Debbie Feldman at Voices.com (LINK: https://www.voices.com/actors/debbiefeldman)

Of course, like any self-respecting professor at a research university like Stanford, Nass didn’t stop after a couple of experiments and call it a day. Through extensive lab environment testing, he developed the Media Equation theory[1]. It introduced the idea that humans assign personalities to machines we interact with similar to the way we do for humans we interact with. That’s highly significant for anyone building any type of technology interface. To demonstrate that concept, listen to the audio clips below.

AUDIO SFX: S2VO1
Credit: Sarah Raines at Voices.com (LINK: https://www.voices.com/actors/Sarah_Raines615)
AUDIO SFX: S2VO2
Credit: Scott William at Voices.com (LINK: https://www.voices.com/actors/SWilliam)
AUDIO SFX: S2VO3
Credit: Amazon Polly Synthetic Voice Joanna

In accord with the Media Equation theory, the persona behind the 1st and 3rd clips should feel more alike than the 2nd one. I believe they do.

A MODEL FOR PERSONALITY TYPES

In his book “Wired for Speech”, professor Nass provides detailed accounts of 20 studies on how voice personality impacts the user’s perception and behavior. He also points out the usefulness of a personality model to help in selecting the right voice characteristics and presents the Wiggins voice personality model as an effective tool. Wally Brill, head of conversation design, advocacy and education at Google, has given several good presentations on using the Wiggins Personality Model, as seen below.

The Wiggins model is simple. There are four quadrants, with the x and y-axis presenting polar traits. The x-axis contrasts distance with friendliness, while the y-axis goes from submissive to dominant. While voices don’t convey all personality characteristics like if a person is intuitive or spontaneous, there are a number of voice traits commonly associated with personality types. Nass focuses on four of them. Speech rate, pitch, variance in frequency, and volume. The Wiggins chart below plots how those voice traits influence personality.

Nass even plots where several common character types reside on this chart. A supervillain like Darth Vader? His deep, slow, stolid voice provides a mix of dominance and unfriendliness. A classic bad guy voice. Superheroes also need to project dominance while also having a friendlier tone. So while they may have the deepness of a villain’s voice, they combine that with a wider frequency range and greater speed, adding friendliness to the mix.

More secondary characters will likely have less dominance, i.e. be more submissive, and will vary along the friendliness and unfriendliness axis based on their desired perception of being on the good or the bad side of the story. This model may provide a blunt view of voice personalities, but it’s a good starting point for discussions around what voice personality would most likely fit a brand.

THE RIGHT PERSONALITY FOR YOUR BRAND

A logical next question is, How do you know which voice personality is right for your company? The answer to that will vary significantly by company, but a good place to start looking is the company’s brand strategy document. The brand strategy document defines the brand’s identity. What the brand stands for. And it culminates in a brand promise: A statement that sums up the brand’s identity.

The brand promise takes into account three things in particular.

  1. The target audience(s) for the brand’s products or services. Not only who they are, but what their needs are, and what they find most relevant about the brand.
  2. The competitive landscape. How the company creates brand distinction from its competitors.
  3. The brand’s capacity for authentically supporting the brand promise. In other words, do the brand’s values and capabilities realistically back up a given strategic position?

That brand promise and the backing research in those three areas should go a long way to outlining the type of voice that will likely resonate with your target audience. Here’s a brand positioning statement template from Hubspot that contains those elements.

For [your target market] who [target market need], [your brand name] provides [main benefit that differentiates your offering from competitors] because [reason why target market should believe your differentiation statement.]

And keep in mind that brand promises are aspirational. Something the brand feels they can be, or at least evolve into. If you don’t have an official brand strategy document, then any information on the above three areas of consideration should be helpful. The better you know your target audience, your competitors and your own brand, the better you’ll be able to determine where your ideal voice should be in terms of friendly vs unfriendly, and dominant vs submissive.

HOW YOU COMPARE WITH COMPETITORS

Making our brand personality distinct from competitors requires that we understand our competitor’s brand personalities. And indeed, while we probably won’t have their brand strategy documents, we can easily observe competitor’s communications. From advertising campaigns to logo designs to color palettes, the assets used in brand communications are a reflection of the values and positioning in their brand promise.

To illustrate this, let’s use an example of two brands from the financial industry: Vanguard and eTrade. When casually observed, financial industry brands can all sound the same. However, with some fairly quick observations of the brand’s communications, we see differing approaches to presenting themselves in the marketplace. 

Let’s start with Vanguard. The company is an icon within the investing community. Indeed, it’s founder, the late John Bogle, was a respected industry giant known for his thriftiness and efficient trading system. Company founders often drive the personality of the brand. Think Ford. Ralph Lauren. Um, Trump. Accordingly, the Vanguard logo font is a conservative serif font. The vintage-looking ship illustration certainly isn’t trying to rock the boat, if you will. Even the color palette is simple and about as unexciting as red can be. 

Now consider eTrade, in contrast. The brand font? Bold sans serif uppercase. The logo? Two colliding arrows. A strong sense of motion and energy. And the color palette. Purple and chartreuse. If you’ve ever seen eTrade TV commercials, you may know them for their sometimes brash and outrageous sense of humor. Vanguard TV commercials? You probably can’t think of any.

While two brands within an industry may pursue different target audiences and may stake out different personalities within their industry, each brand personality needs to be authentic to the company behind it. Considering our example brands, it would be hard to imagine Vanguard using a color palette like eTrade’s. Likewise, eTrade using anything like the Vanguard ship illustration for its icon would seem odd. So at least on the surface, the two company’s brand personalities feel appropriate. Going back to the Wiggins model, you can see how these two brands plot differently in terms of friendliness and dominance. Other brands can be added until you have a complete sense of where your brand stands within its competitive landscape.

WHAT TO EXPECT

Hopefully, this article has provided the reason, value and methodology for giving deep consideration to the type of voice, be it human or synthetic, that will represent your brand. Keep in mind, a process like this won’t define the entirety of your brand personality. But it gives you a structured view for comparing your brand to competitors and provides anchor points for discussion and further analysis.

Chainsaw Product Highlights Risks for Brands Rushing into Voice Industry

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Note: This article first appeared in Voicebot.ai on April 1, 2020

chainsaw image

A dubitable voice product that garnered early VC investment is being taken off the market. The investigative journalism arm of Voicbot.ai has taken a closer look at this remarkable story.

There were doubtful murmurs when the concept of a voice-enabled chainsaw was first revealed back in 2017. But sometimes, the rising tide of a fast-moving industry lifts all barriers to good judgment.

CHAT N’ CUT

The “Chat n’ Cut”, as it was named, had humble beginnings. According to the ‘origins’ story on the brand’s now defunct website, the two founders, both advertising copywriters, had apparently polished off a case of Lumberjack Stout beer after work one Friday night and started brainstorming voice product ideas. In their inebriated state, the Escheresque connection between chainsaws and the voice industry became a direct path to startup stardom.

Sources close to the founders suggest that upon waking the day after their brainstorming binge, no hangover of any magnitude could keep the two from pursuing their newfound dream. Perhaps most surprising, they secured $1 million in funding with little more than a conversation flow diagram. Wil Gamble, CEO of seed funding firm Gamble & Shock, explained their logic for investing in the company:

“So many legacy industries were digitizing. We figured if the taxi and office rental businesses could be appified, well, it seemed like the chainsaw industry was ripe for the picking. Add to that the rapidly emerging voice space and, well, what’s not to love?”

And, while hindsight is 20/20, it seems there were a number of questionable decisions made along the way. The initial target market was the lumber industry. Early field tests were conducted with a logging firm in Veneta, Oregon, and a problem quickly surfaced. While it was easy to turn the chainsaw on by voice command, after it was started, the chainsaw motor noise overwhelmed the mic, and no additional user commands could be picked up.

“It was just weird,” said a field crew boss at the firm who asked to remain anonymous. “Usually, when the ‘jacks are out at work, all you hear is the buzz of the saws and falling trees. But this time, all you could hear was the saw, and then a bellowing voice of one of the ‘jacks screaming “Hey Chat ‘n Cut”, trying to shout commands above the chainsaw noise.”

CHAIN OF FOOLS

Field reviews were understandably bad. But what might have seemed a clear and obvious alarm was misinterpreted by the brand’s market research consultancy. Instead of viewing the research as an indication the Chat ‘n Cut was not a professional grade product, they instead took it as an indicator the product should be repackaged and sold to the consumer market.

We got in touch with the former director of marketing for Chat ‘n Cut to get a sense of how that strategy played out. Apparently, things didn’t go well. Under a blanket of anonymity, she noted that while the OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) were initially focused on metrics like CPS (Cost Per Sale) and NPS (Net Promoter Score), the company soon transitioned to the CPMWM metric (Customers Per Thousand who were Wounded or Maimed).

Voicebot’s investigative reporting team was able to source a key document that indicates management should never have sent this product to the market. The sample dialog flow had plenty of branching leaving us to wonder if there was an actual “happy path” that Chat ‘n Cuts entry-level conversation designers could agree on. It was also heavily edited to add new error states associated with unintelligible speech.

The voice industry remains promising, and we present this story in complete objectivity. While the personal injury attorneys and media feast on the carrion of this derailed initiative, keep in mind the lessons learned from our ancestral early-stage technology ventures. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Me and my synthetic voice

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This post is about the recent experience I had creating a synthetic version of my own voice.

I’ve been interested in synthetic speech since starting my Homie & Lexy podcast, where I generate the character voices in Polly, Amazon’s text-to-speech engine.

And the episode of VoiceMarketing titled “How listenable is synthetic speech” looked at how Polly performs for various types of content, including the Gettysburg Address, simple jokes, a newscaster script, and a Shakespearian sonnet.

Throughout it all, I’ve gotten quite familiar with SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language).

I’d had several conversations with Rupal Patel, CEO of VocaliD, a company that’s doing interesting work in the area of creating synthetic voices. (She was recently interviewed on a Voicebot.ai episode.)

So when Rupal asked if I’d like to go through the synthetic speech process and create a synthetic version of my voice, I was intrigued and jumped at the opportunity. (Full transparency, this article isn’t a paid endorsement for VocaliD. I just found the process interesting and the results impressive, and wanted to write about it.)

Here’s an outline of the process I went through for creating my synthetic voice.

Equipment

Two big points here.

  • Have a quiet recording environment
  • Use a good mic/headset

Both of those may seem obvious, but small problems can lead to big problems in the results. Even a little background noise can cause problems in compiling the speech, as the technology focuses on minute differences in the speech recordings, and that includes non-speech noise that slips in.

For microphones, I used a Sennheiser SC 60, which I use for my podcasts, and it worked well. VocaliD recommends the Turtle Beach Recon 50 gaming headset. Both are reasonably priced at about $40.

Recording

The recording process was fascinating. I read a total of 2,000 statements (they need about 90 minutes of clean audio recordings to work with). The statements ranged from a couple of sentences to short phrases with only a few words. This was all provided by VocaliD, and I recorded it online through their website interface. It took me somewhere around 3-4 hours over the course of a couple days to complete the recordings.

The phrases were an interesting mix of text. Mark Twain. Shakespeare. Famous novels. And even phrases from my own podcasts. More than once I had to do second takes because I’d laughed out loud at what I was reading.

VocaliD has an online recording studio with a simple user interface, or you can upload pre-recorded files along with corresponding transcripts.

Compositing

This is where the magic happens. And I’m not going to dive into a technical explanation of the machine learning advances and end-to-end neural synthesis stuff.

For technical details, I’ll refer you to the VocaliD website.

On a more pedestrian level, the clean audio samples are used to train an end-to-end synthesizer which learns to emulate the sound patterns and intonation of the speaker. And that voice training process goes on for between 24 and 48 hours. So a fair bit of processing.

Demonstration

Let’s run through a few demonstrations comparing my voice to my synthetic voice under different types of phrases. A question, a statement, projecting excitement, and using irony.

Question

Me:

Synthetic Me:

Statement

Me:

Synthetic Me:

Excitement

Me:

Synthetic Me:

Irony

Me:

Synthetic Me:

Results

When I first heard the synthetic version of myself, I was quite impressed. It’s a bit trippy hearing yourself saying something you’ve never actually said. Welcome to the future!

While synthetic voices still struggle with many types of content, I found the diction on VocaliD’s tool impressive for what you might call mid-range content. Texts that can be delivered in a fairly straight forward manner. Not crazy humor. Not high drama. But needed information.

What I think this level of synthesis does more than anything is extend the length of speech a synthetic voice can read for in that mid range of content.

In my episode “How listenable is synthetic speech“, the main factor in whether synthetic speech is usable was the type of content. But coming in shortly after that is the length. A short news or weather clip? That’s more doable. A 6 minute reading of a magazine article? Not so much.

Use Cases

What are some use cases for where we could apply synthetic speech?

My favorite, and this is actually what charted the course for VocaliD, is giving voice to people who are voice-disabled. Rupal makes a great point about how you wouldn’t attach just any prosthetic arm to a small child in need of one. It’s similar for someone who needs a synthetic voice. This creates the possibility for them to have a voice that’s distinct and tied to their personality.

Another example is for brand consistency.

Consider a company like Allstate Insurance, and their use of Dennis Haysbert for their commercials. By synthesizing his voice, they could apply those same brand qualities to their company’s interactive voice system. Any voice assistant apps they develop. And for some companies, that would even apply to physical products they develop.

For the money they’ve spent positioning their brand, defining the right voice to represent that brand, and the contract for Mr Haysbert’s talents the additional cost of synthesizing his voice is nominal, and extends the value of work they’ve already done.

Another interesting possibility is the creation of previously unattainable brand voices. VocaliD is not only able to synthesize one persons voice, but they can also combine multiple voices to create a brand voice that’s not only distinct, but perhaps has qualities never before captured in a single voice. A voice avatar, perhaps.

Sensitivities and Considerations

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the idea of synthesizing someone’s voice introduces a lot of legal, not to mention ethical, considerations. Given I’m not an attorney, I’m not going to do a deep dive into this. But clearly the idea of creating synthetic speech around a person’s voice identity will bring up a lot of issues and discussions in the coming years. I do know the folks at VocaliD have already been thinking about this and are working on ways to watermark a talents voice, similar to technologies already used for videos and images.

As the world of voice technology, voice and audio devices, and voice-delivered content evolves over the next few years, the synthetic voice space is going to offer brands, content developers, and voice talents some unprecedented opportunities. My sense is these changes are going to happen swiftly, and navigating this part of the voice landscape is going to be key to maximizing the impact and value of audio content.

Audio Museum of Art launches on Amazon Alexa platform

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Excited to announce Arrovox has launched the Audio Museum of Art. This should be a fun ongoing project.

It’s a voice app that works on the Amazon Alexa platform. With plans to launch on Google Assistant soon.

So what’s an Audio Museum of Art? As I describe it, it’s a “hands-free, eyes-free museum toured with your voice.”

The idea is to explore different types of content formats, as there should be a lot of upcoming opportunities for brands on the voice web.

The museum’s first exhibit is titled “Vintage Radio Commercials”. The docent, Bot Draper. will guide you through some of the more interesting commercials from advertising’s so-called golden era.

Want to visit? Just say:

“Alexa, Open Audio Museum of Art”

The Audio Museum of Art website is: https://audiomuseumofart.org/