One Pepper, Every Door I built Pepper’s voice features with one customer in mind: my dad. Reading a screen isn’t always easy for him, and I wanted him to be able to just talk to Pepper. The first time I showed him, on my iPhone’s speaker, it kept cutting itself off. I’d ask a question, Pepper would start to answer, and a fraction of a second later it would stop and wait. I was frustrated, because it just wasn’t good enough yet. When I reproduced it later and pulled up the trajectory, the first two answers had been interrupted about 25 milliseconds in, with no speech from me at all. Muting my microphone between questions made it go away. Pepper was hearing its own voice come back out of the speaker and politely yielding the floor to itself.My mistake was testing only on headphones at first. If I built a voice app again, I’d test on a speakerphone from the first day. A speaker flushes out the hardest problems right away, and if it works there, it works even better on headphones and a han...
One Pepper, Every Door I built Pepper’s voice features with one customer in mind: my dad. Reading a screen isn’t always ...
