Don’t lose your customers over a simple misunderstanding.

When we were testing a client’s voice app, we noticed an interesting phenomenon.
User spoke: “May I have an orange juice?” App understood it as: “May I have orange shoes?”
Sergio and I were working out of our separate offices (in Barcelona and Chicago, respectively) and upon seeing the testing output above, we immediately understood what was happening.
Sergio is Italian and I’m Korean American. In our lives, we have experienced people (and recently, digital services) misunderstanding us. We can completely empathize. So, we feel really passionate about making this misunderstanding less painful and awkward for all parties involved.
With the advent of human-to-machine communication, the importance of comprehension is at an all time high. AI -based experiences are becoming more commonplace around the world. It’s not uncommon to see restaurants take advantage of AI-powered menus and drive-throughs. Companies have also been utilizing machines in customer service for decades with interactive voice response (IVR) technology, yet only recently are they applying AI aggressively to make sense of the stream of incoming data.
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Now more than ever, it is vitally important to design and deliver an elegant experience for people who interact with machines. It’s important because this interaction is another intimate touchpoint the customer experiences with a given company/brand. Just as someone at a restaurant taking a food order over the phone would never offer “shoes” even if they misheard “juice,” we should expect our machines to act in the same manner.
We at PacteraEdge help design and deliver an elegant experience by taking the following ingredients into consideration when we craft a lovable human-machine interaction:
Accents
The role that accents play in a lovable voice experience is often underestimated, even within the same country. One of the unexpected insights in our experience is the realization that everyone has an accent. This revelation should seem obvious to anyone who has ever been to Boston, but even in a location, multiple varieties of accents can be heard.
Culture
Besides what people sound like, it’s also important to understand the nuance of how people say the things they say. People from different cultures may not ask for a drink the same way, for example. One person might be more courteous and ask in the following manner: “I’d like a drink, please.” Someone else might be more direct and declare, “One drink, large.”
A machine should also be able to nimbly navigate the conversation and intuitively understand the intent of an order whether the person prefers to say “pop” or “soda.” In both of these examples, the experience with the machine...