The Ethical Considerations, Trust, and Responsibility in Designing Voice UI - UX Mastery

We were very excited to chat recently with Trip O'Dell who, among his other impressive roles, has been a product design lead at Amazon where he worked on the future vision for their virtual assistant, Alexa. Our discussion with Trip was full of juicy insights about Voice UI and the ethical considerations behind Alexa's design, and how we as designers need to be leaders in making those ethical choices. Below is an article we wrote and edited in collaboration with Trip using speech-to-text tools and a linear audio editor. All the words are his, we just helped put them on your screen. When it comes to Voice UI there's a lot of conversation around voices, but very little around personality--whether or not we want to describe it as a personality--that we're creating. How trustworthy should that personality be? Where should there be a natural boundary?