6 Challenges of Today's Voice Assistants Like Alexa

Get to know the six challenges of today's voice assistants and voice-enabled systems to cope with in the future.

What you'll learn
Be able to discuss about current challenges regarding Voice Assistants (VAs) like Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri
Get to know basic principles of User-Centred Design
Pay attention to critical aspects of VA skills whenever you are going to design one

Requirements
You know what Voice Assistants (VAs) like Alexa and Siri are.
Probably you own a VA and know how those systems work in general.

Description
Voice assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Google Home are increasingly common in today's homes. This is not a surprise as they are pretty affordable (especially at holiday sales season) and offer a lot of value to the users: They are entertaining, it is nice to freely ask for the time, the weather or for a calculator, they can be used to control the temperature, the light or the vacuum cleaning bot in smart home environments, and they offer a comfortable way to listen to the radio or personal playlists at home.
On the other side of those positive aspects you find critical discussions often referred to privacy concerns or data abuse due to unauthorised Amazon orders.
In this course, we want to open that topic of things to cope with in the future to increase user value and user satisfaction of future voice assistants and to address valid concerns. The goal of this course is to convey awareness for the relevant topics in that field based on the commonly used design principle of user-centred design/user-driven development. For instance, the universe of assistive technology for impaired people offers a tremendous potential for voice assistants but current systems are not yet appropriate to use in that area. This is subject to current research and the scientific community just got aware of that potential. This is a niche that makes it absolutely crucial to cope with the challenges presented in this course. But of course, other areas in life are affected by this as well, as voice assistants become more and more ubiquitous (think of In-Car voice services).

Who this course is for:
People interested in using, rolling out or designing skills for voice assistants (Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant) and systems with voice interaction support.