On this episode of Digital Conversations we have Wolf Paulus principle software engineer at Intuit join us. He goes over the challenges of using voice for banking authentication, managing the users expectations and creating a frictionless process that delights your user.
Guest: Wolf Paulus- At Intuit, Wolf is an internationally experienced technologist and innovator, accelerating the discovery and adoption of emerging technologies. Changing the world one life at a time. He's also an Adjunct Professor at Grossmont College, where he teaches an intermediate class in the Computer Science department. He was appointed to the advisory committee at the University of California, Irvine, and frequently speaks at conferences and user groups on topics ranging from Physical Computing to Emotional Prosody.
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1. Make sure the bot speeds up the process
2. Manage Users Expectations
3. Give the user more than expected
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Billy: All right everyone, welcome to the show today. Today I have the pleasure of being joined by Wolf Paulus principal engineer at intuit, wolf how are you doing today?
Wolf: Doing great thanks for having me.
Billy: Yeah, thank you for joining us. Really excited to talk about your perspective on conversational interfaces and some of the work you've been doing at intuit around that but before we get into that just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this industry?
Wolf: So yeah, I got born and raised in Germany, got all my education over there and then 23, 24 years ago I came to the US, worked for a couple companies and the last nine years of my journey here is with Intuit. So, Intuit you probably know us as the company that provides you with this tax filing solutions that will allow you to file your taxes from home during these times and a nice thing to have so and we also have QuickBooks helping our small businesses with accounting. So, what got me into voice and conversation user interfaces is early on when I joined Intuit was Siri, Siri just maybe six months or so after I joined into it and we imagine at that point a solution that would open up.
We thought that Apple would open up an ecosystem and let other companies like us play in this space. We started just imagining solutions where we think well imagine people could just talk to our software offerings and we got together with people from our business units and I work for… I'm very fortunate to work for a group that we call Intuit technology futures meaning I don't have to work specifically on one of the products I'm free to look into tech, into solutions that may help or even hurt our products in years to come, it’s like I'm open to experiment a little bit more than you typically do as an engineer.
Billy: Yeah
Wolf: So I started looking into that and Apple never opened up, so the first solutions that we built were on android actually android had still a very crummy but working voice speech recognizer and the speech synthesis worked okay, it was still robotic but we could build prototypes around that and so that got me started in the space of conversation and voice user interfaces specifically. We did experiments, we failed a lot, we learned a lot at the beginning. So one of the one of the earliest learnings was that voice user interfaces are really not great when it comes to data collection, one of the things that we really wanted to do we wanted to let users use the phone and use it for data collection like for our small businesses to enter their receipt data which is a cumbersome process so we wanted to help them but we found out really early on that the users hated solutions like that and it's just…
Billy: What do you think that was like I mean I used QuickBooks this morning, the mobile app to put in receipts for you know for our business here
Wolf: Yeah
Billy: Why do you think they didn't like the voice entry on it?
Wolf: So first of all thanks for being a customer yeah um yeah I think there's too much ambiguity, it's not the speech recognition not working, it got so good in the last couple years the same with speech synthesis so natural and I would love to talk about speech synthesis, this is one of my hobbies on the side in a way to make speech that this is really work well natural sometimes even funny. So the technologies that that we build our solutions on really got so good but if you think about it, if you were to enter like an address using your voice and or like email address for instance there's so much ambiguity in that you end up you end up spelling it out for the speech recognizer to work well with that stuff
Billy: Yeah
Wolf: Your friends names, their street addresses all this is cumbersome and error-prone to enter with your voice, so it's not really that it doesn't work, it just takes longer than typing it in and one of the biggest benefits that voice user interfaces give us is frictionless access to information and what I just mentioned data collection is not a frictionless process when you use your voice so that's I think why it doesn't work.
Billy: Yeah, that would that would make sense, I think you know we were talking to Pulse Labs the other day and they do testing for voice skills and I think voice is really good for accessing information but you make a good point, recording it there is some ambiguity there, we like to see things written down as humans we're like okay I see it there.
Wolf: Yes and you would always have to kind of ask for confirmation then right is that what you entered? is that amount so and we can make this work obviously but is that a good use case for voice that was [inaudible 06:00] our learning early on we can do it if we have to but it's not really what users are looking for it's not a delighter
Billy: Yeah
Wolf: And that was kind of what got me going in this space so again we failed a lot at the beginning but we got a lot of learnings out of that and if I maybe give you another example if it's not just only the frictionless way we can access information with an Alexa skill for instance, is also that we should let the skill or whatever you build maybe you build an app for yourself and not build on these mega platforms but we should let these things do all the talking. So, it's not just only 50-50 I think it should be the skill should do more of the talking compared to what you do.
Billy: Yeah
Wolf: So we see it everywhere and examples that people find helpful find delightful on these skills look at just the thing that everyone talks about what they use is what's the weather today, not only does it know where you are it gives you the current information and gives you a little bit of a preview and if you would measure the time how long does it take me to ask it for information and how long does it take for the response it's overwhelming, an overwhelming amount of information enough time that these good working skills do the talking and so there's also like learning let the skill do the work.
Billy: Yeah, I got you, I got you so where have you guys found success using voice at Intuit then?
Wolf: Not all that much actually right so we are still what some people call nibbling on the edges, one of the reasons is what I just said that the benefit is frictionless information, what comes against us is privacy and security right so we need to… we are obligated to ask for a voice pin for instance like amazon will not let a skill on the public storefront if we don't protect financial information with the voice pin and so we are now in a competing situation with your phone basically right, does it take more time, does it take more action to get to information on the phone versus the speaker.
Billy: Yeah
Wolf: So, we are in this kind of still in a balanced convenience versus security
Billy: Yeah
Wolf: That's true for the phone as well I think so we have fingerprint or face id to unlock the phone and you swipe around a little bit find the app that you want to open, now you open your app and then again you have to authenticate inside the app using probably the same mechanisms and then you swipe around in the app for a little bit until you find the play that you were looking for so all that is not so different now when I say Alexa open my banking skill and then it asks what's your voice pin and then you give it the pin and then you have to utter the intent that gives you the place where you find the information. So it's very similar, so we lose a little bit of the frictionless access to information because we have to protect it with the voice pin would be nice to have… most of these devices now have what it's called speaker identification meaning they can differentiate if it's you or your wife or your kids
Billy: Yeah
Wolf: But that's not authentication but it would be nice if we had voice authentication whereas where a user would be really authenticated, we would know this is the person who owns an account and then we could forego all the initial authentication requests with the voice pin.
Billy: That would be… how far off is I'm sure eventually we'll get there, like what are your thoughts on how realistic that voice authentication could be?
Wolf: There are a couple companies that have solutions, nuance comes to mind you have all heard my voice is my password kind of thing, there's more companies like that. They are mostly are currently applied in the financial space so we have… we know of a couple of brokers who um have um systems trained for all their employees so there's a little bit of training involved, same way how you train your phone to recognize your fingerprint, same way your phone has to learn what your face looks like right, so the training process is a little bit involved at the beginning but the benefit comes with usage.
Billy: Yeah
Wolf: So we could imagine the same and maybe the whole covid crisis right now helps us with that a little bit because like once you have a mask on and in like where we currently go if I want to go and buy groceries I have to have a face mask on and it's not currently encouraged to touch surfaces so touch id and face id may not work all this well currently and so maybe that pushes voice biometrics into the direction where it becomes a part of these mega platforms.
Billy: Yeah, now that's a good point, that's a good point so I've heard you talk about conversational interfaces besides just voice, like a traditional chat and wanted to get your thoughts on when those interfaces are a good use case and when they probably aren't?
Wolf: So I'm probably one of the most critical people when it comes to chat bots and maybe it's because I see them more as a traditional technology or maybe I just compare them currently with IVR’s, IVR’s (interactive voice response) we all remember and sometimes even after we use these systems where you kind of call your bank or your insurance company and most people are not the biggest fan of these systems and so you compare it with why is that I think it's the more or less the decision tree that IVR’s still are, they are better systems but what they now call natural IVR’s if you would call a system like Bank of America it's amazing really what these guys have done maybe to briefly tell you how these things work so you would… you pick up the phone, you call the system, they ask you for the last four digits of your bank account and if you are a frequent user you would know that so you are now four touches in and then they ask you for your atm pin again if that's how you do your banking you would remember that number too.
So you know eight touches in and then something amazing happens they will greet you with your name it would be like hey wolf, thanks for being a premier customer how can we help you today and if you experience that for the first time you're blown away because you are expecting the press one for checking, press two for credit cards kind of thing. So, and again if you hear this for the first time you are probably stunned you don't know what to say right you would expect the decision tree to happen and so that's what's called a natural IVR. Unfortunately, our chat box text chat is currently not there yet, most of the text chatbots behave more like IVRS, strict decision trees sometimes even let you type, you kind of just have to like pick from two or three options that they give you how to continue.
Billy: Yeah
Wolf: So not a big fan of those things and again I I'm probably a little bit too extreme here but I could see it as just a temporary thing just like the blackberry was a temporary technology that happened and got completely replaced by newer phones that like don't have keyboards, physical keyboards anymore so we will see how this works
Billy: So, let me ask you this why you know I mean we build a lot of a lot of chat bots and you know it is largely just a decision tree and you can do them well and you can do them not so well. We see both ways and sometimes we build something we realize that's not good we're going to go back and redo it but you know when you do see that done well what does that look like to you, it's like oh I actually like this chat bot.
Wolf: What I like is if there's a lot of free form like where I have still the illusion that I'm in control of the conversation and so this asks me anything kind of which is of course not true you don't ask a chatbot for anything, you don't have time to waste so it's domain specific. So when we say ask me anything we mean ask me anything in the domain, in kind of the restrictions of the expectations that I have yeah and so that is… I think that's super critical to set expectations right and if we would go back to Siri, how did they do it so well we all knew how Siri’s voice sounded before we ever interacted with her for the first time. We already knew what we could ask her because we saw commercials and we saw it introduced at the WWDC conference and so on. So that's what apple does so well they said expectations and it was not a surprise to hear her voice and it's that's what we have to do with the chat bots as well, we have to set expectations, you have to say yeah this is the area that you can ask me things and I can respond to these questions. So those are good chatbots I think that don't surprise you too much or surprise you maybe by giving you a little bit more than you had expected.
Billy: Yeah
Wolf: What you don't see a lot i think with chatbots is that people will end the conversation with thank you which they do with well-built Alexa skills that's I think one of the measurements, do you get a thank you at the end.
Billy: Yeah, no that that is a great point uh one of the things I really I'm totally on board with you with the manage expectations for what this bot can do and what it cannot and get people familiar with it, if you don't manage the expectations your bot is going to fail even if it's as simple as a bot that's on a website to qualify people to book meetings for the sales team, if you don't say hey I’m going to ask you three questions or two questions or whatever it is, people are like okay when does this end you know and they made bail before they were almost there and they could have had this bot do what they wanted but they didn't know what the expectation was and then ending the conversation with thank you that's spot on.
Wolf: We see different, different types of spots right, one is that I often call the bouncer, the bouncer is the guy who just sits there and it's kind of the firewall shielding the human representative from too much work basically and you can also call the filter or whatever you want to call it but we have to be very clear from the beginning and tell people that. So you're talking to a chatbot and this is not a route to get to a live representative if that's what the bot is doing right so that's expectation then I know oh this guy, the bot can only help me with things that are maybe more faq-like of things but not if I have a real technical problem and think that where I know the bot will not be able to help me or if I want to negotiate maybe that's what people currently really do, they call the cable company to negotiate at a better rate.
Billy: Yeah
Wolf: That's probably not what your chatbot is helping you with and so we’re very open and upfront about what the what's the role of the chatbot is it a bouncer or is it just somebody too well something that's collecting information to help the representative that you will talk to later to have all the information already available.
Billy: Yeah, now that's a great point just managing those expectations whether it's like a bouncer or a filter bot or it's I’m going to you know let me get some information before I give you somebody just be clear on those bots like what it actually does and the biggest mistake we've seen with our customers when we come in is they've already got some bots and the expectation is not clear what these bots will do like yeah nobody's interacting, nobody's doing anything with them help us and the number one thing is okay let's set the expectation for what I can do and what I can't do.
Wolf: Yeah
Billy: So awesome man, well we're running out of time but I do want to ask you where what are some areas where we're not using conversational interfaces whether it's you know a type form or voice that you think are coming in the future?
Wolf: Well I still think that what we need to do first is get more people familiar with voice user interfaces in our domains. So, if you ask the general population do you feel comfortable doing financial topics for instance on the smart speaker the majority would say they are not really comfortable with that. However, if you look at the current user base which is really large right we cannot just call amazon echo users freaks or early adopters even
Billy: Yeah
Wolf: There is really a large part of the US population who has at least one smart speaker in their home, so if you ask those people they are really comfortable talking about finances, their personal finances on these speakers. So the people who have already adopted they are there but to really get production we have to first get even more people on board with these technologies and for that like we said earlier, you have to be able to delight them with frictionless access to information.
Billy: Yeah
Wolf: So that's kind of where what I still see as a milestone that we have to tackle and data collection like we said also this will not be a good use case probably ever.
Billy: Yeah, I mean we've all got phones in our pockets so you know if you need to take a take a picture of something to record it that's so good now you can take a picture of a receipt and some tools and it'll pull all the information right out for you, why do I need to regurgitate that. Well awesome wolf, thank you so much for the time and if people want to reach out to you and continue the conversation what's the best way for them to contact you?
Wolf: Well just enter my name into google Wolf Paulus you find me on I don't know LinkedIn and just add and I have also of course the web page where I frequently post things around cui around voice and it's quite technical most of the time actually so wolfpaulus.com.
Billy: Okay, okay thank you wolf and we'll chat later.
Wolf: All right, thank you so much, thanks for having me that was fun.
Billy: Yeah it was