Voice-based Assistants and Getting Personal

A deeply intriguing story from BizEdge, Microsoft’s Digital Assistant: This Time It’s Personal:

“Designing an intelligent personal assistant for new markets requires abandoning a ‘one size fits all’ approach and instead requires embracing thoughtful local customisation that takes into account what is important in each individual country and culture,” says Ash.

Ash says Cortana is evolving for each market, prompted by the team asking the question, “What’s important in a personal assistant in this market?”

Based on research results, Ash says the Cortana team assembles a local of creative writers, editors, programmers and voice talent to build a relevant, tailored experience.

Voice talent is carefully considered for each market and is customised to reflect the local language, idioms and speech patterns of each country, he says.

Cortana’s local personality is based on insights about each culture and the core foundations of positivity, confidence, intelligence and transparency.

Their approach seems likely to work in places where there’s more or less one “cultural understanding” but I wonder how it maps to the US where it depends on what “is” is. Do we have enough common culture here?

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