Value of Voice Control Coming Through Loud and Clear

Voice control has come of age, with greatly improved voice recognition, natural language and machine learning. The amazing ability to understand any voice with any accent is a huge achievement. Pairing that with the ability to respond in a conversational manner means voice control will become the de facto user control interface for many devices.

Millennials are probably the biggest users of voice control: more than 50% use Siri, Google and other systems to get answers for anything from restaurant recommendations to the distance to the moon. In the home there is increased reliance on “intelligent personal assistants” such as Alexa and Google Home.  Comcast is heavily promoting its Xfinity TV voice control system, and considering moving away from traditional remote controls altogether.

When machine learning is involved, the ease of voice control and the power of big data can transform lives.  Combining video or audio search data, all other searches on the Web and conversations with a personal assistant can inform the music you play or the content you watch, recommending a wider breadth of content choices that are tailored to consumers’ lifestyles.

But the real pleasure is the simplicity of acting hands-free. The ability to easily ask for something and quickly get the results may be ending the days of mind-numbing up-down flipping through a guide. You don’t even need to go to the Internet.

Here’s a scenario that might take place in the my house when the “Sports” command is given and a filtered list appears:  A more specific request – “Broncos” – might offer choices of multiple teams, but based on location and viewing history, we’d get information on the Denver Broncos and their upcoming games.

Pay-TV operators have had voice control on their lists for some time, but the technology has needed fine tuning to avoid adding to consumer frustration. The advancements in technology mean that now, for good reason, they are all clamoring to put voice control into their ecosystems, providing a much easier and much more intelligent user experience for their subscribers.

"Discovery, Personalization and the TV User Experience"

Written by Susan Crouse

I recently had the pleasure of attending the Television of Tomorrow (TV0T) conference in San Francisco. This included a fun hour participating on a panel about "Discovery, Personalization and the TV User Experience.” The conference is a great collection of industry experts, providing interesting insights, knowledge and entertainment. TVoT seems to find all the newest upstarts both on the technology and talent side, particularly in the area of “digital media,” which TVoT and others define mostly as OTT originating from the Internet. They also are closely tracking the television viewing habits of the millennial and gen Z demographic, as they seem to be eschewing television services, satisfied with on-line and OTT options.

On the panel, I was joined by Campbell Foster from Adobe, Kimberly Hicks of Viacom, and Andre Swanston of Tru Optik. Gerard Kunzel was our moderator. We discussed a wide range of UI ideas including recommendation engine integration of social and other big data sources, simplification of the UI, personalization for each household member, the trend toward voice control, and much more. If you missed the event, TVoT will eventually have videos of all the sessions on their website.

AltiView 3: Features and flexibility in a next-gen UI platform

With more competition than ever for consumers’ attention, pay-TV operators are seeking user interfaces that can easily be tailored as precisely as possible to viewers’ wants and needs.  In this video, our SVP and Chief Architect, Bill Helms, explains how AltiView 3 enables unparalleled flexibility for pay-TV UIs, including UHD support and the option to incorporate such features as program popularity, genres, previous viewing selections and even metadata from consumers’ other media sources to inform search, discovery and navigation. 

The Winning Ticket For Pay-TV Operators

Forget the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.  The results that pay-TV operators are interested in have been tabulated, and they paint a clear picture of why intuitive navigation experiences are becoming increasingly important. 

According to the Leichtman Research Group, 81% of U.S. households now have a DVR, use VOD services from a cable or telco provider or subscribe to Netflix.  Moreover, 30% of households use two of those services and 13% use all three.

What this means is that subscribers are making use of more platforms than ever when it comes to content sources, creating a need for navigation that presents a 360-degree view of all available options.

Rather than searching individual silos for content of interest, subscribers are seeking to narrow the myriad of entertainment choices to their specific interests.  Forward-thinking operators are migrating from traditional guide paradigms to advanced user experiences that prioritize channels from all sources based on established viewing preferences, and supplement video content with related applications that enhance the viewing experience.

As content sources continue to expand, viewers can be expected to “vote with their feet” – shifting their loyalties to those experiences that offer the best views across linear TV, DVR, VOD and even SVOD.  The winners will be those operators who invest in new technologies that continually strive to offer personalized, customizable interfaces that most accurately address viewers’ individual preferences and needs.

Trends in Recommendation and UX at TVoT

I traveled to Television of Tomorrow (TVoT) last week in NY City. This show runs twice a year bouncing between NYC and San Francisco, and although the NYC conference is shorter, it is just as intense. There was the usual mix of targeted advertising, User Experience, and OTT trends resplendent with Periscope stars. I participated in a panel on recommendations and UX trends led by Patrick Donaghue, the longtime Cablevision UI visionary, and included representation from LG, Digital Smiths, Rovi, Freecast and Lingospot.

While recommendation engines have been around for sometime, they are starting to mature with new trends blending big data from social networking to increase the effectiveness of recommendations. Taking all those new data points and creating an innovative UX that addresses a new generation of viewers is the challenge put forth to Alticast UX designers. Our 4K AltiView 3 concept UX was shared to exemplify these new trends.  The biggest challenge is bringing all these great ideas together and getting them out in front of consumers.

AltiView II

Check out this video of AltiView II, Alticast's next generation user experience. AltiView II is a UX design that personalizes entertainment in a unique way by keying in on genres and providing a simpler, yet personalized user experience.

AltiView II lets you spend more time watching and less time surfing.  Combined with smart recommendations, the user can easily discover content and dovetail in applications for an enriching viewer experience.  The architecture behind AltiView II lets operators decide what applications to package and what to charge for, letting them extend services and revenues.

Optimization

As Operators begin to use HTML5 to deliver the User Experience for millions of people to multiple devices, understanding how to optimize their UI will be very important. We are keeping our sights on this and will be posting various ideas for optimization so that Operators can broaden their scope of devices where they might deliver an HTML5 UX. The television industry has unique devices with legacy systems that are quite restricted in CPU and memory, so optimizing the UX can really pay off. 

The cable industry isn't alone in considering this challenge, and in fact there is a whole conference that is held at least twice a year on Web Performance. Fortunately the conference posts videos of their talks and interviews on YouTube. Below is the listing of videos from their most recent event in SantaClara, and if you are in the area, the next one is in London starting Wednesday Nov. 13th. We'd like to hear your ideas too, so please enter comments or contact us to enter a guest posting.

http://bit.ly/1fklO00