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Business Elf
Inspiration
I've been creating services which get Internet articles to users for the last 15 years. I created the BBC's first news and weather app in 2005 with iPhone look and feel, 2 years before the iPhone and one of my startups created a personalised news portal for 4M customers in 12 countries. This time I'm doing it again except I think this is the most innovative yet.
I wanted to created a very simple Voice UI with the clever part in the back-end. The idea is the user is given few choices, they just hear stories which Elf thinks suit that person because of what they previously chose.
The use case is as follows. User wakes up in the morning and says Alex open Business Elf, it reads a story, the user can say "Alexa, Next" or "Alexa, Add", interrupting the reading. After the user has added a few stories he/she says "Send and Stop". An email is sent to the user's phone so he can read the articles on the train on the way to work. The act of choosing a story allows Elf to learn the stories the user likes.
What it does
The skill must be enabled in the Alexa app because it does account linking. At that point the user can optionally change weighting on topics which define the stories.
Then when the skill opens, it reads the business stories the user wants to hear. If he/she wants more about the story he/she adds the story to a basket which can be later sent to a phone for reading the whole article. Our back end learns what each user wants by modifying the weights on the topics differently for each user. The user can further edit those topics manually by saying setup.
How I built it
The system uses RSS feeds which run several times per day- generating hundreds of stories per day. When processed each story is categorised with the topics. For each user we store preference data (the topics and weighting) and each story is given a score. The highest scoring story is the next read one. Once read the story is marked as heard. The user can say "forget heard" to hear stories later.
Challenges I ran into
During development privacy issues became important. Also the new EU GDPR rules caused us to add functionality to enable Data Portability and Right to be Forgotten. This required extra work which is now complete.
Also the Economist is a subscription service which is only useful to people who have a subscription so we made this a choice defaulted off, so those with a subscription can turn it on.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We feel we've created a very usable and simple Voice UI. Our philosophy was choiceless voice first design and we believe we created something very useful for users. This video describes a use case https://youtu.be/IYmofAydEHQ.
What I learned
The "choiceless voice first" approach has really worked well. The whole concept is to have as few interactions from the user as possible so even when the user does an action such as add it will do that but also read another story.
What's next for Business Elf
We also created a Science Elf which reads science stories. Since we can only submit one entry, we chose Business Elf as the one to submit. Science Elf is specific to scientists and we believe Business Elf will have a wider audience. We will do other subjects such as Tech Elf and other subject areas too in the future - we could also do bespoke Elfs for businesses as a B2B solution.
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