Should we be saying Please & Thank You to Alexa?

I did find that when my interactions with voice assistants didn’t go well, I found that any rudeness that transpired was down to the voice assistant not getting the information or action intended, therefore creating the annoyance. I then understood what the media was trying to get at with voice assistants and children behaviour (kinda). My reactions to the technology not working would bleed out into my human interactions the same way that you deflect annoyance to others when things do not work as you hope or expect. This behaviour is not specific to voice assistants, these devices are just getting the bad press currently as the latest technology, but it happens with all technology, it doesn’t work until it works.

As voice assistants take on even more human characteristics and voice becomes more ingrained into our lives, we have to be prepared for a situation where it will become indistinguishable between a voice assistant and a human, in a voice conversation. This is where the ethical lines have to be drawn when anyone, in particular children, can’t differentiate between what is human and what is a machine, now we have a problem.

If we feel politeness is a valuable part of our language, we should be advocating for the creators of these platforms to add in a cultural intent that goes beyond language accents but adapts to the country and person that is being conversated with. People, especially children work best on positive reinforcement; if you want someone to say please and thank you, then you better start saying please and thank you.

The world of work, politeness as UX

All pleasantries will go out of the window as performance will dictate how responsive and productive voice tools are within a business environment. If you can save your workers 50% of their time by dropping politeness, the majority of companies would agree that is what should be done.

Does politeness become bad UX in this situation?

“add 1 item”.

rather than

“Please add 1 item to the inventory list, thank you.”

I am still on the fence if my children should be speaking to Alexa in a polite way, though for now, I will continue to teach them to be polite to anything living and explain to them that Alexa will now be called Computer (It’s new wake word) and that it is exactly that, a computer.

If your building applications for voice, it is good to understand what your ethical guidance is. @rarelyhq now apply’s a mindfulness stage to voice app development with the aim to understand the impact of the proposed voice design on users emotional behaviour.