Opening Keynote with Jon Bloom & Wally Brill of Google

Featuring:

Jon Bloom,Senior Conversation Designer at Google
Wally Brill, Head of Conversation Design Advocacy & Education at Google

Did you know we may have been talking for over 350,000 years? In this time we’ve learned that for conversations to work we rely on each other to be as truthful, informative, relevant and clear as the situation warrants. It makes sense that we use this and other conventions of human language as we create Ai and voice technology with which we can communicate easily.

In this discussion, we learn about persona. Persona is the face you show to the world, the who of who you are and what people experience when they first meet you. So what is the persona of AI? How does AI talk? How does it act? Why is it important that AI have a persona in the first place?

“When people hear any voice they automatically and unconsciously ask a personality to it”-Nass and Brace Wired for Speech 2005.

Persona is not just a voice. Persona is expressed through voice, language, behavior, audio content, visual content and typography.

While core characteristics stay the same it may offer in different voices. Google Assistant developers believe that the only way that they can manipulate the voice is to be consistent in its guiding principles and resulting behaviors.

While everyone has a persona, it comprises many elements. There’s flexibility in some of these like voices. Google maintains the guiding principles and resulting behaviors of the Assistant’s persona to keep it intact.