World Voice Innovation Summit 2020 Alex Nicol EDF Energy | Bounce Technologies

1. Building in-house R&D to
push boundaries for
Voice systems
Alex Nicol / EDF - Bounce

2. Hola, I’m Alex Nicol!
Full Stack Developer & conversational system specialist
EDF in the UK — Blue Lab, Smarter Living team
Bounce Technologies Limited
AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder
@nicol_alexandre | webnicol.fr | GitHub: alexandrenicol

3. ● One of the largest electricity producers
in the world
● Largest producer of low-carbon
electricity in the UK
● 40 million customers
● 160,000+ employees
● 2,000 R&D researchers and PhDs.

4. 4R&D UK Centre Main title | NOT PROTECTIVELY MARKED
A full-stack Digital Innovation team
Multiple skills
Software development
Data science
Machine learning
Team members
12 Virtual reality
Augmented reality
Digital design
Tools & technology
Data·lab UX·lab Block·lab AI·lab
Work·lab
Nuclear
Renewables
Smart Customers
Digital Innovation

5. Freedom
- to explore
- to use
- to buy
- to break

6. Mark Zuckerberg
“Move fast and break things. Unless you are
breaking stuff you are not moving fast enough”

8. The EDF Energy skill
Taking the first step towards voice

9. Journey
Got an Echo from USA
September 2015
First working demo
Using Amazon’s US developer
account. November 2015
Start of the EDF skill
Docs, code, collaboration...
January 2016
28th September 2016
→

11. Early findings
● Amazon is pushing it
● New UX, new tech → It’s hard
● Fun & Satisfying
● Interest from the business

12. What’s next?
What to do now that we have a skill?

13. What does it mean for a human
to speak to a round black box
that listens and speaks back?

14. We’ve always dreamt about it, right?

15. The uncanny valley

16. Going beyond, part 1
Collective intelligence

17. Collective intelligence
“The combining of behaviour, preferences, or ideas of a group of
people to create novel insights.”
Programming Collective Intelligence, Toby Segaran (O’Reilly)

18. Collective intelligence
- What would a bot look like, if we let our users decide its responses?
- We needed a lot of Data.
- The aim: a bot that has an infinite amount
of answers to 1 single question.

19. Our system
Question
User’s Data
Similar users
Users’ Preferences
Best possible answers
(or question)
Feedback
Rules

20. Collective
Intelligence in
Conversational
Systems
● User clustering
● Collecting preferences in
real time
● Ranking responses
● Recommendation engine
● Rules

21. Going beyond, part 2
Multimodality

22. Multimodality
The combination of multiple forms
of communication and interaction
to create a single experience

23. The combination of multiple forms
of communication and interaction
to create a single experience
Multimodality
● Reduces cognitive load
● Reduces input errors
● Voice-only has limits
● Voice-only != voice-first

24. What about multi-device
multimodality?

25. Our solution

27. Multi-device
multimodality
● Pushing UX
● Ambient computing feeling
● New interactions
● Open new doors for user
journeys
● Incredibly satisfying

28. Final thoughts
● We’ve raised awareness
● It’s only the beginning
● We’re not alone anymore
● There’s funding
● We’ve got (new) skills!

29. Thanks!
Alex Nicol
alex@webnicol.fr
webnicol.fr