User:Joca/essay Unleash the assistants

Unleash the assistants

'Are you ready to get started?' I tap on the speech bubble that says Yeah, let's do it. An indicator appears with three bouncing dots. Someone on the other end of the chat is typing. 'Ok, let's get you the latest news.' A GIF of a rapping Michelle Obama appears on my screen. Then a new message comes in, 'It took only two weeks for Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming to top the 2018 book charts'. I can reply using one of two options: Next, or 📚 👏

Quartz, a website for business related news, envisions that this is the future of reading news: you chat with it. Two years ago the publication launched the Quartz Brief app, in which a jolly chat bot guides you through the news by sending story blurbs with funny GIF's and occasionally an advertisement. The app taps in on the rising popularity of chats as a way to interface digital services. This trend is especially visible in China, where WeChat is the go-to app for everything between ordering groceries to buying concert tickets. (Grover, 2014)

The chat bot is heavily restricted in its conversations as I am only allowed to send emoji or skip to the next article. One could even argue that there is no conversation happening at all, as Margaret Rhodes (2016) stated in her article in Wired after interviewing the creators of the app: 'A conversation is an exchange of ideas between two or more parties, and in Quartz’s app the user doesn’t express any original thought'.

Although these constraints are clear to me as a user, the messages do feel personal. Or at least more engaging than a block of content that floats by in a news feed. There is some logic in the statement once made by Matt Webb (2015) that it is strange not to use the same language to our software as to our friends: chatting.

News on the speaker

Chat bots to interface the news are not common yet, but many news media are working on podcasts at the moment. Interestingly enough, these examples of audio journalism share the same appeal that the Quartz bot has: they feel more personal and engaging than text or video. This leads to an audience that listens for long time each session. To journalists this is . At the launch of the daily podcast of The Guardian host Anushka Asthana spoke out her ambition to delve '(...) further into the big stories and cutting through the noise to take our listeners behind the headlines'. (Guardian press office, 2018)

Following this logic, voice-activated smart speakers like Google Home and Amazon Echo are fantastic interfaces for news. You can talk to the digital assistant in a way that is even more personal that the chatbot of Quartz. And the speaker will talk back, like a personalized podcast. Listening to news is heavily promoted by Amazon and Google. A news anchor function is integrated in both voice platforms. Google Assistant lets you scan swiftly through the news with commands like 'Play BBC Minute at 2x speed'. Amazon trained their Alexa platform to speak like news anchors do (Vincent, 2018) to make the computer voice more enjoyable to listen to.

And although the adoption of these digital assistants is growing faster than for smartphone and tablets in their beginning stage, there is something strange: news consumption on smart speakers is lower than you might expect from their popularity. (Newmann, 2018)

Unleash the assistant

Practical reasons: cite report

Another reason: an assistant might not be the best role for news

Master slave

Description of problem

Idea of an alternative

Nav and reeves

Drucker

End

Quart busy further developing platform. Bot lives in different chat apps.

Personality of UX designer.