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?

When you consider the timeline of artificial intelligence (AI), the emergence of the technology as a viable means to automate retail banking services has only come about in the last few years. Progress with machine learning algorithms, increases in computing capacity coupled with decreases in cost, as well as the generation of vast amounts of data have made the development of conversational AI possible. Many banks are only beginning to use this technology now, but over the coming years we are going to see a proliferation of AI-powered banking assistants. The first modern conversational AI-powered virtual assistant came in the form of Apple's Siri, which was introduced as a feature on the iPhone 4S in 2011. Today, Siri is used by 500 million monthly active users around the world.

The idea of talking conversationally to computers has been a long time in the works. Science fiction is so often a self-fulfilling prophecy as it provides a vision for humans to chase after with technological innovation. For those of us who have watched voice-based computer interactions evolve, we have seen it go through many manifestations as it grew up. We now find ourselves in a world where using voice to interface with a computer is commonplace on a regular basis for the masses. While I'm not quite confident we have reached an inflection point, I am confident we are at least on the cusp of one with voice-based user interfaces and the vision of the Hal 9000 (The AI assistant of Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series) and Jarvis (the voice based AI assistant of Iron Man).