Digital assistants have become a part of our everyday lives. As they become more useful, we’re beginning to get over the friction of speaking to phones, speakers, watches, and computers. With the technology rapidly improving, we’ve also seen a bunch of companies working on augmenting this with realistic digital characters in the hope of improving the overall experience. Our research and experimentation have challenged our thinking around how to do this well, if at all. Factors like appearance, proficiency, discrimination, and comfortability all come into play.

My early exposure to artificial intelligence with some sort of visual representation first came…

As digital assistants invade our lives, the opportunity and limitations are becoming more evident. Natural language processing and the digital manifestation of these, reinforced by machine learning, is rapidly developing. When the opportunity to understand and evaluate digital human technology came along, I leapt into the deep end with a team of equally enthusiastic specialists. As I write on the learnings, I thought it would be worthwhile to describe the set up for context.

The scope was to learn as much as we could about this new type of interaction. The team engaged with stakeholders and used a series of…