Digital Assistant Extensibility Client Voice Integration
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current digital assistants face challenges in providing seamless and unified voice interaction across multiple applications, leading to disruptions and inefficiencies in user experience due to varying voices and languages.
Innovation Solution
A digital assistant extensibility client that exposes an interface and service, allowing third-party applications to integrate with the digital assistant's voice, enabling unified voice input handling and rendering user experiences using native voice, language, and text-to-speech services, with developers registering voice commands in a manifest for seamless transitions.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If multiple applications use different voice inputs and rendering, then application functionality is expanded, but user experience consistency deteriorates due to varying voices and languages
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a universal voice service layer that provides consistent voice input handling and text-to-speech rendering across multiple applications. This service layer acts as a common interface that applications can utilize, ensuring that voice interactions maintain consistent characteristics (voice, language, behavior) regardless of which application is active, thereby resolving the contradiction between application versatility and experience consistency.
Solution Approach 2:
The voice service acts as an intermediary between applications and the voice processing system. Instead of applications directly implementing voice functionality (which leads to inconsistency), the mediator service handles voice input interpretation and speech output generation, ensuring unified voice experience while allowing applications to maintain their specific functionalities.
2Adaptability or versatility
If applications implement their own voice handling, then application independence is maintained, but user efficiency deteriorates due to disruptions and distractions during transitions
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments voice handling functionality into a separate, dedicated service layer independent of individual applications. This segmentation allows applications to remain independent and focused on their core functions while the voice service handles all voice-related operations, eliminating disruptions during application transitions and improving user efficiency.
Solution Approach 2:
The voice service serves as an intermediary that manages voice input and output across application boundaries. When users switch between applications, the mediator maintains continuous voice context and prevents disruptions, allowing seamless transitions without requiring applications to re-establish voice handling, thereby improving productivity.
3Reliability
If a unified voice service is implemented across applications, then user experience consistency is improved, but system complexity increases due to integration requirements
Solution Approach 1:
By creating a universal voice service that multiple applications can utilize through a common interface, the system achieves experience consistency without proportionally increasing complexity. The service is designed to be reused across applications, meaning the complexity investment is made once rather than replicated in each application, thereby mitigating the complexity issue.
Solution Approach 2:
The voice service is designed to be self-contained and self-managing, handling its own initialization, configuration, and state maintenance. This self-service capability reduces the integration burden on applications, as they simply need to invoke the service rather than manage complex voice handling logic themselves, thus reducing overall system integration complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
A digital assistant supported on devices such as smartphones, tablets, personal computers, game consoles, etc. includes an extensibility client that exposes an interface and service that enables third party applications to be integrated with the digital assistant so the application user experiences are rendered using the native voice of the digital assistant. Specific voice inputs associated with a given application may be registered by developers using a manifest that is loaded when the application is launched on the device so that voice inputs from the device user can be mapped by the digital assistant extensibility client to the appropriate application as input events for consumption. In typical implementations, the manifest is arranged as a declarative document that streamlines application development and provides a seamless user experience by enabling customization of third party applications to integrate the digital assistant's voice and behaviors within the user experience of the application's domain.