KQED · 2020
The Voicebot Chronicles
A series about voicebots, delivered as a voicebot. Obvious now, not obvious in 2020.
What it’s like to not be understood
By 2020 a lot of us were talking to machines. Phones, speakers, anything with “smart” in front of it. A co-worker told me about her two kids and the Alexa in their kitchen. The older one could get it to do anything. The younger one it simply didn’t understand.
That’s a small daily humiliation and nobody was really talking about it. The questions underneath it are bigger than they look. How well do we actually want to be understood by machines? How much do they need to know about us to get there? Would you lie to one?
Someone could report that story. But a written piece about being misunderstood by a voicebot asks you to remember the feeling, and remembering is not the same as having it.
So we made it a voicebot
I started at KQED in 2019, and early on Chloe Veltman, an arts and culture reporter, approached me in the newsroom after standup. She’d spent her career in radio, so voice was something she’d thought hard about long before machines started using it. We kept talking, and the more we talked the more we wanted to make something together.
The Voicebot Chronicles is a series about voice that you navigate with your voice, on Alexa or Google Assistant. Reporting and interaction in the same thing. You don’t only listen to it, you’re in it.
That sounds obvious now. It wasn’t then. Most voice was one-directional: the assistant spoke, you listened, and the only thing you said was the request that started it. We wanted the talking to be the piece, not the way in.
It’s one continuous experience in three parts, not a set of episodes. Nobody was coming back on a schedule for something this new, so it had to carry you from one idea to the next, with places to stop and places where it turns and asks something of you.
The first part is the clearest example of what that bought us. Chloe interviews Dimitri Kanevsky, a research scientist at Google who lost his hearing young and now builds speech recognition so people who are deaf or hard of hearing can be understood. Then it turns and asks you to say some difficult words to your own voicebot, and to notice how that goes.
Reading about someone who spent a career on being understood is one thing. Being misheard yourself, thirty seconds later, in your own kitchen, is another.
Later in the same experience, Cathy Pearl, who led conversation design outreach at Google, talks about what makes a conversation with a machine work. Then you go have one and see.
The Voicebot Chronicles was made inside the KQED newsroom, with producers, reporters, and audio engineers, not by an external creative firm. Reporters kept it honest, and it’s why an audience already inclined to trust KQED was willing to try something this unfamiliar.
What happened
It won a Regional Murrow, and a 2020 Webby for Best Writing in Apps, Mobile and Voice, in a category where it was up against HBO. It was also a finalist for an Online Journalism Award, Excellence in Audio Digital Storytelling, Limited Series.
What did we learn
When the subject is an experience, put the person in it.
You can describe what it feels like to be misunderstood, or you can arrange for it to happen and let someone notice. The second one doesn’t need to be argued.
The form follows the intent.
We didn’t start with voice as a technology to try. We started with a question about being understood, and voice was the only place that question could be asked honestly.
Early work looks obvious later.
A series about voicebots delivered as a voicebot reads as a natural idea now. It wasn’t one at the time.