Voice platforms don’t make building communal skills easy

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

If a voice platform like Alexa or Google Home Hub doesn’t prioritize communal computing, how should skill developers build for everyone in the home and office?

In this recent article with Opus Research, I give advice for skill developers to make their skills more communal and the case for platforms to be better adapted to everyone that could use it:

Why Voice Platforms Need to Make Foundational Changes to Allow Multi-User Skills

I give four key pieces of advice for skill developers:

1. Use voice profiles, if available
2. Don’t trust behavioral data from communal devices
3. Build pseudo-identities of the location, rather than a person
4. Ask when in doubt

Also, you can find a recent talk version of this post with the Bots & AI meetup:

I hope this advice is helpful as we build skills (and eventually platforms) that are better adopted for everyone in the home!