ACADEMIC PROJECT
Equal Voice
An Alexa skill that facilitates in having an inclusive meeting and encouraging an equal participation across the table.
View Process Deck
An Alexa skill that facilitates in having an inclusive meeting and encouraging an equal participation across the table.
View Process DeckGroup meetings have become a part of our everyday lives, be it a project discussion at school or a business meeting, the amount of time spent in meetings is significantly high. But unfortunately, not all team members are able to participate in group discussions. Through this project we aim to create an experience to make these meetings more inclusive and satisfactory for all attendees.
Voice UX • UX Research • UX Design
October 2020 (4 weeks)
Alexa facilitates a discussion by gently encouraging participants during pauses. When instructed, Alexa turns on group discussion mode. The video illustrates the final concept of how Equal Voice would work across a meeting room.
When instructed, Alexa turns on group discussion mode. Using voice analysis, Alexa encourages the quieter participants by prompting them during pauses.
The first step is to have an Alexa skill app installed on your device. Search for Equal Voice skill and then enable the skill on your device. Alternatively you can also prompt Alexa through voice.
Not all meetings demand equal participation amongst all participants. Equal Voice provides different modes to accommodate to different situations. Alexa when paired with Echo, displays the meeting health. This representation helps participants visualize and regulate their participation in the meeting.
Members of the meeting would need to mark their presence through the equal voice app by entering the meeting code. This would help Alexa better moderate the meeting.
At the end of the meeting, every member of the meeting receives a report of the meeting and individual feedback, through both Equal Voice app and email.
Personality Type: Extrovert
Personality Type: Introvert
We conducted 6 semi-structured interviews to understand if this was really a problem. Surprisingly, the users resonated a lot with the fact that office meetings are not inclusive.
“A meeting is considered productive when all members have the feeling of being heard, and their ideas are valued.”
- Senior Engineer, Atlassian
“I sometimes feel guilty after a meeting, especially when I think hijacked most of the conversation. I’d certainly like to be aware if I am doing so. ”
Program Manager, Microsoft
“I have had many managers say, ‘You have great ideas, but you need to speak up more in meetings.’ It gets really awkward and I don’t know how to respond ”
Engineer, Traveloka
Individuals often require motivation and encouragement to state their opinions in a group.
Self awareness can help individuals in reflecting upon their actions and making suitable amends.
A meeting is considered productive when all members participate and feel valued.
Meet Q is a genderless voice assistant. It promotes inclusivity by using a voice frequency that is neutral. It guided our thought process by showing us that inclusivity is possible just through voice.
Women Interrupted is a critical design concept that reflects on the fact that women do not get an equal opportunity to speak in meetings and how much they are interrupted.
We believe encouragement is a constructive way to bring about diverse opinions from everyone across the table.
The group discussions should be inclusive of all and should be biased against race, gender, personality or any other criteria.
We want individuals to be aware of their actions and consciously make an effort to bring equality.
Meet Jim, Rebecca, Kelly and Jason! They work together at TechOnline and often find themselves in meetings for team discussions
Position: Manager
Personality: Balanced speaker and moderator He organizes meetings and acts as a moderator.
Position: Developer
Personality: Speaks when requires however, once she starts speaking it is difficult for her to pause.
Position: Product Manager
Personality: An open speaker who often interrupts during meetings
Position: Researcher
Personality: A listener and introvert, finds it hard to communicate during meetings and often waits for his turn.
They work together at TechOnline and often find themselves in meetings for team discussions
To rapidly prototype the behavior of the Equal Voice concept, we decided to use a phone call on speaker mode that will mimic Alexa’s behavior. We started the group discussion on a topic relevant to all. Analyzing the frequency of participation, the phone call would interrupted the conversation to make it more inclusive.
Interruption during a conversation can be intimidating for people. At this time, we need to be consciously aware of the content, and alexa should tweak the voice tone in a way to make it sound more motivating and encouraging.
How do we differentiate between a 5 minute meeting and an hour long meeting? We need to empower users to set the meeting timing and chose if they want to be interrupted or not.
Firstly, Alexa needs to the detect the number of people in a meeting to moderate it, how do you plan on doing that?
Secondly, there are different kinds of discussions, how do you plan on differentiating those?
From a technical perspective, Alexa may sometimes fail to register if someone spoke, what would one do in this situation?
Utilizing a soft gradient consisting of more warm colors felt like the perfect fit for Equal Voice’s branding. The color pallete evokes the feeling of being in an office space merged with navy blue to give a composed vibe.
Home Screen
Meeting Category Selection
Starting the meeting with the code
Meeting health during the session
Equal Voice Mobile App Prototypes: Mark attendance and track meetings
The project taught me how important it is to have engineers early on in the product meetings. We would not have been able to discover loopholes in our idea early on and iterate the product to improve its feasibility.
Apart from visuals of the app, we had to consider the Voice UX. It was important to understand the voice intonation of how Alexa will prompt introverts to participate in a meeting to make them feel encouraged as opposed to feeling anxious and embarrassed.
