[Music] so thank you for coming we got the coolest people at i/o right here give yourselves a hand excellent excellent so thank you for joining me we're gonna dig into the world of persona first I want to see a show of hands how many people brought a persona with them today great it's a trick question you all did so oh I better get the clicker so we're gonna talk about how persona can make your actions stand out they can extend the brand and they can increase usability first I'm Wally brill I'm the head of conversation design advocacy and education here at Google and I've been teaching world lots to talk for about 20 years actually I've been teaching him to talk longer than that but when I was a kid they didn't talk back which was kind of depressing so this is a previous persona of mine I even had hair I just want to tell you folks there is no distinct correlation between hair loss and designing personas it's okay alright so years ago when I had hair I was a record producer I was working mostly in the UK and I had this idea whether it was good or not I'm not sure but I wanted to create an opera that was interactive I wanted you to be able to talk to the characters and change plots like one of those choose-your-own-adventure stories right so what did I do I decided I would find a technology that would work to do this and in those days we were thinking about things like CD ROMs I don't know if any of you remember CD ROMs yeah oh I see a nod I see a couple of nods okay good um so I went to the company that invented speech recognition and I said to them can you tell me about this stuff and they said well you know about sound come in here and they made me take a job there and what happened was they sent me to see a man called James Jango Lola I don't know if any of you know of him he was one of the pioneers of conversational design for interactive speech and he gave a talk at Stanford which completely blew my mind because it was about how you can speak naturally to a robot and it will speak naturally back to you he wrote a book called voice user interface design which I recommend to anybody who's interested in this stuff so moving along this is our fabulous conversation design team that I recently joined at Google lots of happy faces there now let's get down to it what's a persona how do we go about designing the perfect digital employee that's gonna work for us and make us stand out so what is a persona it's the aspect of someone's character that's presented or perceived by others it's your face that you show to the world it's the who of who you are that you let people see right now in acting people use personas all the time in the 1930s on Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer to the version of Romeo and Juliet that was very successful it was very widely liked and it's it well now spin on to the 1990s and here's Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes performing exactly the same content but with very different personas and it came across very much more contemporary and it was a big success at the time but very very different from that original film now everybody's got a unique persona you get it when you're born it changes with you as you develop and as you grow and like I say it's the who of who you are it differentiates this one from another and makes us individuals but now we live in the future right there are 500 million devices that have the Google assistant on them 500 million can I get an okay right that's a lot of people it's a lot of devices too so people have high expectations of what an intelligent assistant can do and how and where we can interact with it and it's not just this thing that you talk to now we're talking about surfaces that the AI moves across effortlessly from your Google home to your TV to your smartphone to your car to your watch all these surfaces we have to take into consideration when we're designing persona see it's not just voice it's also audio content like sound design it's visual content now it's interaction design the interaction design actually has a lot to do with how your persona comes across and it's even typography here's a quick example this is a joke I'm not holding up any hope for it being a great joke but you can see that the punchline is really punched up because of typography so we got to think about visual surfaces as well as audio situations so let's pivot for a second and now talk about a voice first world and understand why persona design is so important so we're going to talk about a series of documents that you will make when you're designing a persona and what they'll do is they'll help you keep the writing the things that this system says consistent and clear because otherwise it can appear fractured and if the personas fractured people lose trust in the actual action so in Wired for speech oh sorry there is no thing such thing as no persona by the way I that was my trick question I stuck in there there we go in wired for speech cliff Nass and scott brave said when people hear any voice they automatically and unconsciously assign a personality to it this is a real important thing within a second second and a half of hearing a voice you create an image in your mind you have an idea of who you're listening to you know what I mean so whenever you hear somebody calls you up that you don't know you've got an idea of who they are you have a sense of them because you know what we can infer age we can infer gender we understand their educational level by the kind of things they say we get register now register is the social context it's where this persona is in relation to me is it my boss is it my employee is it my peer who is this that I'm speaking with we also get a sense of locale if they have an accent that's different from ours we just don't recognize accents if we have the same one so the other inferred traits we get our intelligence trustworthiness and likeability all these things come through in that first second second and a half of hearing a voice so it's really important that we get this right we have to set ourselves up for success because now more than ever the experience of the action is the brand to the consumer what happens is every touchpoint matters so billboard advertising the web radio TV absolutely social media absolutely every touchpoint is carries the brand essence and so it's vital that we get it right because if we leave it to chance you never know what you're gonna get so you don't just use anything you've got to design your persona because otherwise the results will be unpredictable so how do we do it how do we actually design one this is where some of the fun stuff starts we need to make that digital employee and what I've done is I've suggested we take two airlines to map this out and to talk about how we do it these are two airlines that obviously don't exist one is important airlines it's a national care it's it's important it's you can see their strapline we're important and we will get you there right kind of traditional kind of straight you know on the other hand there's millennial Airlines and their strap line is it's an awesome day to fly you want to say that with me it's an awesome day to fly once more with feeling it's an awesome day to fly great thank you so the first step in designing a persona is we need to understand the brand we need to interview the stakeholders we have need to talk to people in brand and marketing in customer experience customer service we want to look to see if there's a style guide now the marketing people and the brand people will have already done this they'll have distilled their brand down but you want to go over it and understand it and really get it so you're going to experience the product who you're gonna get on the plane and go take a trip somewhere you may visit the contact center because those contact center agents are actually carrying the brand essence with them when they speak to customers over the phone you're gonna check out social media and if there's a retail component you'll go into a store right so let's talk about important for a second let's talk about my water for a second here it is so important Airlines brand is solid they're confident they're experts they know what they're doing they're reliable they're utterly straightforward there's no frills or anything and they're safe they got a great safety record but you're not gonna get wildly excited flying on important right no surprises now millennial on the other hand where it's an awesome day to fly thank you for helping me with that the Millennial Airlines brand is bold it's hip it's fun it's friendly it's even exciting and delightful it's a whole different kind of world it's it's there to bring excitement of travel into your life so those are to say some brand essences right now let's understand the customer we need to know who's going to use this interaction so we want to understand their context and their customer journey we want to know who they are through their demographics where do they live what are they like how old are they we want to understand the frequency of engagement because that's gonna have a lot to do with how verbose your prompts are if there are frequent frequent users you can keep things really short if they're infrequent users you might want to give them a little more information and we want to understand their expectations and needs now one thing you should know is that people generally like to be mirrored they like the idea of interacting with someone who at least relates to them in some ways it's a preference right so the important Airlines customer mid-thirties and up these are business travelers their frequent frequent fliers their Road Warriors their high-value because those business class and first-class seats are expensive whereas on the other hand our millennial customer is late teens to mid 30s their Millennials their holidaymakers their backpackers their young families going to Orlando maybe their budget-conscious and they don't use the airline very much they use it for holidays you know once or twice a year so we know the brand we know the customer now what tasks are we gonna do here so what I've chosen is fly fo flight information that's what's the status of my flight is it going to take off on time is it late has it been cancelled when is it expected all that kind of good stuff right which leads us to choosing the medium for the audio now there is two ways to do this you can use text-to-speech TTS I'm sure you all know what that is versus custom recording which is when you have an actor in front of a microphone recording right text-to-speech is the computer-generated voice custom recording is the human actor so text-to-speech is infinitely scalable it's really easy to use it's really cheap because what it's doing is it's reading written content it handles dynamic content really well so in our case we've got an airline with a lot of changes going on you know Duluth to Minneapolis blah blah blah all these all these things that are going and stuff changing on the fly so we'll probably use text-to-speech there oh can you go back one please there we go the cons are limited voice availability and occasionally you'll hear i I think sundar mentioned this in the keynote you hear prosity and the porosity is the melody of speech and occasionally certainly in the old days text-to-speech prosody wasn't great I think you'll agree from what we heard this week that it's now phenomenally good it's almost indistinguishable from human speech so time out magazine in London decided they would use text-to-speech they do listings of events whatever is hip and happening as you can see Sanjay Vikas said from secret tango lessons to breakfast trays using the assistant to connect timeout visitors to the coolest stuff to do and they do they created tea Oh who's a millennial she's hip and happening she knows what's going on in London at any given time let me give you an example of what she sounds like okay google talk to timeout hey you again got a quiet week ahead not anymore when do you want to go out today this week or this weekend warn you I'm tea oh no one knows the city like me because I've been discovering the brilliant and searching out the secret and extraordinary for a long time if you want to know about food art culture and nightlife then I am your social companion try me what do you want to do and when do you want to do it where are you from in West Kensington born and raised on the estate was where I spend most of my days chillin out maxin relaxin all hipster skatin so much that I would get a blister with a couple of mates I'd go out on the town started seeing my bank balance go down I got into debt and my mom started to shout she said you need to get a job at a place called time out what else do you want to do quit that's pretty cool right pretty interesting that's a pretty solid persona and you get a sense of who she really is now on the custom recording side heads face which does meditation guidance needed to use an actual real voice Andy put acum who is the the guy who started headspace and he does guided meditations and I won't play one now because they chill me out so much I couldn't carry on with this talk but they're really really good and the thing about custom recording is its natural its expressive its comprehensible and any voice in the world can be used right you can go and hire anybody to be the voice actor now luckily for headspace they've got Andy he's there all the time because sometimes it can be expensive to record and maintain and it relies on the availability of that artist and he goes there every day so he's okay so let me play you an example of headspace just a short one to hear what the voice sounds like hi my name is Andy and welcome to headspace using proven meditation and mindfulness techniques I'll show you how to train your mind for a healthier happier more enjoyable life to get started try one of our short sessions they're each under two minutes long it can help bring a little more mindfulness into your life there are three options to choose from wake up take a moment or mind which one would you like to try okay now because we're doing flight information we've chosen TTS right so the fun part how do we design this persona how do we create that perfect representative our digital employee what are the steps we have to take this is where we get creative dig into that creative brain and let's get going so we go back to the airline's we understand the brand the customer the task and the medium now we're gonna go and invent some people we're gonna write biographies for imaginary characters who might be a good fit for the job that we have for them so who's that perfect representative who can it be they got to make the action useful and usable they've got to be comprehensible they've got to be somebody that you'd really want to work with the first step is register we need to know what that social context is right we talked about this a little bit before what's the relationship between me and that and that persona is it my peer a really close friend of mine is it an employee somebody that works for me and just does whatever I ask whenever I need it or is it an adviser somebody who maybe knows more stuff than me is at somewhat of a higher level and that I'm taking information from now when we do this for real you'll probably want to create three different personas and you may make them of three different registers ones appear maybe two or our our employees you'll play around with it a little bit and you'll make the register different for them now have a look at this chart this again comes from Clifford Nass and you'll see that there's a vertical axis which is dominance and submissiveness versus friendliness and distance this is kind of handy because when you're deciding what kind of persona you want and how it's gonna relate to your customer you can use this quite effectively to position them now for important Airlines we decided we wanted a butler somebody like a butler who would relate to that demographic that we had remember they're 35 and up so we wanted somebody with some gravitas it's I'll give no hints but it's it's a British air airline British airline and so we wanted a sort of concierge character that you could trust so we have Terence Butler he's 56 his occupation is Butler he comes from Bromley in Kent which is a lovely suburb now why do I care about his height and weight because it affects voice it affects the largeness of the voice versus the smallness of the voice so there's a lot in there in terms of size he's solidly built he's got thinning silver hair that's just a shout out to people who are losing their hair he lives where he works he's single and he went to the Ivor Spencer International School for Butler administrators which is a real place can you believe it phenomenal carrying on he's a collector of rare wines why do we care because he's detail-oriented his parents Jack was a retired hotel manager so he understands the hospitality industry right um his mother was a retired nurse again a caretaking profession so he doesn't have any siblings the reason we're interested in siblings is if you're the oldest of four kids you may be a little better at being a caretaker than the youngest and my family actually works that way I'm the youngest and I'm a little crazy but my eldest brother is very straight ahead what does he like to watch he likes to watch upstairs Downstairs Downton Abbey he reads the daily telegraph and historical fiction by Hilary Mansell he's also been 30 years in this job so he really knows it now we flash back to the brand attributes of important and see how they match up so important is solid its confident its expert its reliable its straightforward it's safe right so how does Terrence relate to that well he's a butler he's been a butler for a long time he's confident he's expert and he's reliable he's very straightforward and he's worked for that family for over 30 years so he's somebody who can trust and the fact that he's an avid collector of rare wines tells you that he is detail-oriented and he is an expert now the next step is we're going to create beyond this bio we're gonna create two more documents we're gonna create a monologue which gives us a sense of who this character is it's a paragraph like a conversation that they're having with a friend in a bar or somewhere where they're just telling them something that happened that day or that week and it's really just to get us into the character a little more deeply and if you're using custom recording with voice actors it's a great way for them to dive back into the character if they've recorded that monologue once because on Monday they may be in the studio recording for a sausage company and on Tuesday they may be doing a car commercial but on Thursday they're coming in to do your action and you want them to be in your persona so that's why these materials really help the monologue really helps so let me give you an example of one I quite enjoyed this occupation it's extremely gratifying to know that one is indispensable if sir is stepping out of an evening I shall have prepared sirs dinner jacket and accessories and I shall of course assist him in tying his bowtie the work of a gentleman's gentleman is never done so he's pretty formal right his language is pretty formal and the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna create a sample dialogue now I know that all of you whenever you decide to make an action or create an action you start with conversation you start with sample dialogues right you write the conversation out like a two part play here's the user here's the system here's the user here's the system and that really helps to tell you whether this conversation is natural sounding so here's Terrance in an actual interaction the way he would be if he were working in the action okay google talk to important airlines getting important airlines good morning you're through two important airlines am I speaking with Wally that's right thank you and don't you require information regarding your flight to London today yes so and do you require information regarding your flight to London today very formal language very much in persona very much locked into what we would expect for this character now let's move along and go to millennial which is as we know a very different airline indeed so the Millennial Airlines persona is a young woman we call Helen high-water I'll say that again Helen high-water she's 26 years old she's a gate agent at San Francisco International she comes from Mill Valley California another nice suburb she's five five 115 pounds to general physical description shows that she's kind of a hipster she's got this wild asymmetrical haircut she lives in a three-bedroom apartment in the mission with a couple of friends of her as Jack who's a software developer interestingly enough and Natalie who's in med school she's going out with Gary who's a drummer in a band called the ironic three now the reason their ironic is because there are five members she studied drama and English which gives her a lot of help towards what she really wants to be which is a stand-up comic that's her dream she spends every free minute working so her parents Ron manages Mill Valley branch of the Bank of Marin so she has a certain sense of responsibility Lucy teaches English Lit at Mill Valley Middle School so again a love of language right these won't kind of factor in and you may think some of these things aren't not that necessary but I promise you if you get into a studio with a voice artists they're gonna go thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you this gives me some depth that gives me something to work with she doesn't have any siblings her work history was that she was a bartender at Cobbs comedy club she likes Game of Thrones stranger things fraud City to a lip Amy Schumer Amy Sedaris all the good stuff now go back to the brand this brand is bold hip fun happening they're friendly they're exciting and they're delightful I think she could be a really good match for this so let's see how she ties up for it 26 year old hipster she's hip she works paid agent in San Francisco International she's done it for three years without missing a day she's reliable we can count on her she's a people person she gets along with everybody even drummers that makes her friendly and fun and her dream is to make a living as a stand-up now if you're gonna be a stand-up you better be bold you better be friendly you better be fun and please be delightful so she's got a monologue let's have a listen I use everything and believe me when you deal with the passengers there's endless amounts of material like the woman who was going to Boston but her luggage was on its way to Austin or the parents off on holiday who each expected the other one to bring the kids to the airport then there's the guy who thinks he deserves an upgrade because he was in some obscure rock band from 20 years ago or something let me tell you it's great training for a stand-up and I get paid for it and if I can deal with them there isn't a heckler in the world who can bother me so pretty consistent she is who she is we get a sense of her through the monologue now let's see what she would be like in a sample dialogue actually doing the job okay google talk to millennial airlines getting millennial airlines millennial airlines it's an awesome day to fly is this wall-e yep great do you want info about your flight to London today that's right so completely different kind of language do you want info it's an awesome day to fly very different than our last persona Terrance because these brands are so different and we need to be consistent to the brand okay so as you can see it makes a difference right so in terms of positioning these guys where do we think they would fit on this chart well let's start with Terrance he's kind of submissive he's introverted he just does what he's told he does the job he does it very very well but he does the job he's not overly friendly he's not distant he's just kind of in that middle place somewhere and what about Helen she's super friendly she's an extrovert to the extreme and she's she's a lot of fun so she belongs right there over on the right the next step which we're not going to dive into too deeply right now is what we call user testing sometimes you do what's called Wizard of Oz testing and you can do this effectively with dialog flow by actually mocking up quickly the main paths of your interactions and then playing them for four people have people work through them and get a sense of how useable it is and how much that persona matches their ingoing expectations so we got a few takeaways for you first review the actions you've already made and they're wonderful I know but is the persona clearly defined you feel confident that the persona is well imagined and well created is representative of the brand the user and the task does it work right number two to find that persona you're going to follow the process learn about the brand know the user know the task and define appropriate characters which is for me the fun part and then bring it to life write these monologues write these sample dialogues and make recordings of them because you can only tell about conversational voice user interface by listening to it if you read it on the page it won't have the same effect at all and if you've got stakeholders that you're trying to talk to about what you're doing and to explain this is the right thing they've got to hear it you don't want to give them anything with writing on it just just say close your eyes listen to this and then test test your action with real customers low fidelity prototypes dialogue flow however but you wanted to Rive some data and some proof points for your stakeholders to say customers users really felt this was right for our brand and that gives you success I hope I'm sure and it will be wonderful and you'll make beautiful personas and so with that I'm going to ask you to give us some feedback you all know the drill and finally here are a couple of resources that are really quite wonderful developers.google.com I uh Cathy pearl who just recently joined our team wrote a wonderful book called designing voice user interfaces which I recommend highly Clifford NASA's book wired for speech I also recommend highly he talks about persona at great great length and James Chen golos voice user interface design is a really really important baseline book this is this is this kicked off a whole generation of bowie designers so with that thank you very very much for coming and have a wonderful rest of Io [Music]