Week 16

Hello everyone, welcome to our final post!

We made a last minute change in the demo, where the robot (Babs) waves at you and the player have to say “Hi” in order to trigger the next set of interactions. We did this in order to give the guest a feeling of being in charge.

We had a rehearsal with the faculty after implementing the changes they asked for on Monday. Following this, we presented to a large crowd at EA, and had our final playthrough with a lot of guests playing our demo! The presentations were successful and we will be using the last few days of the week wrapping up our project, writing our project post mortems and archiving everything before everyone heads out!

Here’s a quick summary of the TOP 5 LESSONS we have had over the semester:

1. Expectations from a voice interaction are affected by character species and the environment.
2. Today’s voice assistant devices complicate their underlying services. What we really wanted was a chatbot.
3. In a voice interaction, guests follow social norms until those norms are violated.
4. Contextual awareness is the key to conversation.
5. Non-verbal cues in a face-to-face interaction are interpreted as feedback whether intended or not.

This industry is moving really fast, and everyone is encountering these problems. We got to witness all the problems… and the power that voice interfaces have to offer! We strongly believe that voice has incredible potential on every platform especially VR.

We are hopeful that we can polish the project demo a bit more over the summer and present it at various conferences! Thanks for staying with us on this journey 🙂

– Team Sweet-Talk (Signing Out)