[Wactclc-alma] [External] "Alexa, where is the movies section?"

[Guidry, Wade]

(I’m cc’ing this thread over to CLAMS-L, since it’s probably of general interest. And offers a production use-case that already exists at EvCC.)

I picture more general use, rather than directly tied to Primo.

Just out of the box, an Echo might answer some basic reference questions, and maybe even offer some basic language translation services. It would just be a different modality form factor than what you can already do with a search engine.)

Looks like Alexa incudes a lot of built-in “intents” (like localbusiness<https://developer.amazon.com/docs/custom-skills/localbusiness-intents.html>) that might be leveraged to offer things like open hours (assuming the data sets in use cover colleges).

(It would be interesting to start asking your Siri / Alexa / Google Home device things about your own school, to see what it might already know.)

The main thing I have to add to the thread, though, is that Everett CC already has 18 Alexa’s deployed on their campus, with some custom skills already developed:
https://www.everettcc.edu/administration/college-services/it/technology/ask-alexa

In addition to the out-of-the-box functionality, EvCC lists the following “Ask Feather Star” customized EvCC question types that can be posed:

·         College Facts - "Tell me a Fact" or "Give me a fact about EvCC"
·         Location and Services - "Where is location/service?", "Where is the location/service located?", or "Locate location/service"
·         Department / Service Hours - "What is the hours for location/service?", "What are the location/serviceoffice hours?"
·         Department / Service Phone Number - "What is the phone number for location/service?", "What is the location/service phone number?"
·         Campus Events and Deadlines - "When is the event?", "When does event start?"


Wade Guidry
WACTCLC
Library Consortium Services Manager
wade at bigbend.edu<mailto:wade at bigbend.edu>
http://www.wactclc.org<http://www.wactclc.org/>
509.760.4474


From: Wactclc-alma [mailto:wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu] On Behalf Of Daniel Moore
Sent: Tuesday, July 2, 2019 9:44 AM
To: WACTCLC Alma Discussion <wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu>
Cc: WACTCLC Primo discussions <wactclc-primo at lists.ctc.edu>
Subject: Re: [Wactclc-alma] [External] "Alexa, where is the movies section?"

ATTENTION: This email contains links. Please follow best practices before clicking on links
Full disclosure, I'm on the reference desk right now and don't have access to the ELUNA repo, so I can't few the presentations. And I hate asking this question because I fear the tone/connotation is negative, but, what is the actual use case of this?

I remember years ago when the Apple Watch was debuting and folks on the Twitterverse / San Francisco typed a lot about how it might "revolutionize" the way people interact with digital services and resources in the same way that the advent of the iPhone ushered in a consumer-friendly* mobile web. But then... as near as I can tell, no one has bothered trying to adapt their site/resource/whatever to that screen and interface. I feel similarly when I think about incorporating voice into a discovery layer.

And not to be SUPER negative, but, ExL hasn't even nailed screen readers. If there's a scenario wherein a person says "Hey Google, what time does the EDCC library open today?", then Google would probably be better served by scraping the data from Google Maps, which is itself scraped from our hours widgets. There's already a level of authority there that will ensure that the data is readable by the voice/AI system, since reading static hours data on Google Maps is something that an AI can and should be able to do. But Primo is a piece of ultra-niche software that - still - hasn't hit the same web standards of accessibility and usability that we've come to expect from anything on the internet.

What about known title searches? Asking "Hey Google, does the Lynnwood public library have a copy of 1Q84?" could work, especially if the output is toned to something straightforward. "I found a few records: the library has two print copies of 1Q84 on the shelf, one copy checked out, and an audiobook copy available via Overdrive" would be a solid response. But could you imagine a research query using voice? It's like calling your insurance company and being met with some phone-robot with a menu tree with a bajillion branches. In those cases I just mash zero until I get a person. </grouchy old man>

To conclude my early morning rant - talking to a computer with natural language and getting natural, actionable language back has been and remains a super rad thing ever since Star Trek, but I have to tell my Google Home a few times to turn off the lights at night and I wouldn't want to tell students they could trust asking an Alexa their Eng 101 research topic.

And semi-related, but Alexa skills are apparently a massive untapped goldmine of secondary income<https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/12/student-makes-10000-a-month-inventing-skills-for-amazon-alexa.html>.

-Dan

On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 9:27 AM Thomas, Kirsti <Kirsti.Thomas at seattlecolleges.edu<mailto:Kirsti.Thomas at seattlecolleges.edu>> wrote:
Greg Bem may chime in on this.  He attended a presentation on this by one of the California schools and had things to say about the complete lack of concern for patron privacy on display there.

I attended a different presentation at Developers Day on this topic. The speaker was from one of the big research universities in Iowa.  They were working on an “Alexa-like” or “Siri-like” voice controlled app. This school had very deliberately decided *not* to use any of the commercially-available voice assistant AIs because of the laws governing student and patron privacy in their state. They had a stable of programmers and developers in their *library* IT department ( 😭 )  to write their own app. The app was limited in what it could do because of the privacy concerns—it didn’t provide personal information like “What things do I currently have checked out? Do I have any fines on my account?”—but it was able to do things like report on library open hours, and perform searches via voice command and read back search results.  It was pretty cool, but, like I said, they had their own group of programmers and devs in-house ( 😭 ) to do this work.

Kirsti S. Thomas
Library Technical Service Manager
Seattle Colleges
kirsti.thomas at seattlecolleges.edu<mailto:kirsti.thomas at seattlecolleges.edu>





From: Wactclc-primo <wactclc-primo-bounces at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-primo-bounces at lists.ctc.edu>> On Behalf Of Herman, Amy
Sent: Saturday, June 29, 2019 09:11
To: WACTCLC Alma Discussion <wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu>>; 'WACTCLC Primo discussions' <wactclc-primo at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-primo at lists.ctc.edu>>
Subject: Re: [Wactclc-primo] [External] [Wactclc-alma] "Alexa, where is the movies section?"

This was also mentioned as an up and coming trend at Computers in Libraries, in March. I came back and looked into creating Alexa Skills but quickly realized it's beyond my capacity :)

Amy Herman, Library Faculty

Olympic College

Bremerton, WA

(360) 475-7256

aherman at olympic.edu<mailto:aherman at olympic.edu>

________________________________
From: Wactclc-alma [wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu>] on behalf of Guidry, Wade [WadeG at bigbend.edu<mailto:WadeG at bigbend.edu>]
Sent: Friday, June 28, 2019 11:48 AM
To: 'WACTCLC Alma Discussion'; 'WACTCLC Primo discussions'
Subject: [External] [Wactclc-alma] "Alexa, where is the movies section?"
One of the themes I saw in the ELUNA 2019 presentations, that I was going to mention on Tuesday but forgot, is the beginnings of AI use in libraries.

Two presentations at ELUNA centered around the use of Alexa in the library.

On a personal note, I recently bought an Amazon Firestick+, which is basically “smart TV” functionality on a small HDMI-connected computing device.

Built into the Firestick is a cut-down version of Alexa. I hadn’t previously paid much attention to Alexa, Echo, Siri, etc. But after using the Alexa functionality even briefly, I realized what game changer this stuff could be.

At the same time, I saw these Alexa-oriented presentations, and did some quick searching on other library efforts around AI.

This stuff is coming, and the potential use of these voice activated devices in libraries for reference, accessibility and even language translation services is pretty intriguing.

I’ll probably be looking this summer, just out of personal interest, at how to program Alexa “skills”, which I believe are the building blocks of enabling custom abilities into Alexa. Such as answering such questions as “where is the bathroom?”, “when does the library close?”, “where is the movies section?”.

Davis, Greg (2019) Connecting Primo to Amazon Alexa.<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocuments.el-una.org%2F1927%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cee1a444e245b412ed0ee08d6fcac69cb%7C02d8ff38d7114e31a9156cb5cff788df%7C0%7C0%7C636974214770762379&sdata=cOMNKM7WKtj0YnVAjPLWM3AYRwgkNUH3x0O1SxzflXk%3D&reserved=0> In: ELUNA 2019 Annual Meeting, April 29-May 3, 2019, Atlanta, GA.

Shih, Win and Muraoka, Royd (2019) Say Library: When Alexa Meets Primo.<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocuments.el-una.org%2F1812%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cee1a444e245b412ed0ee08d6fcac69cb%7C02d8ff38d7114e31a9156cb5cff788df%7C0%7C0%7C636974214770762379&sdata=7UYGGhmLcGftx5d%2Fk7pYqLa%2FQjRPCr90zDADGVFCuac%3D&reserved=0> In: ELUNA 2019 Annual Meeting, April 29-May 3, 2019, Atlanta, GA.


Wade Guidry
WACTCLC
Library Consortium Services Manager
wade at bigbend.edu<mailto:wade at bigbend.edu>
http://www.wactclc.org<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wactclc.org%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cee1a444e245b412ed0ee08d6fcac69cb%7C02d8ff38d7114e31a9156cb5cff788df%7C0%7C0%7C636974214770772387&sdata=8XZcCR8PeeNrIly0rYTrQlVdgQpP2vm7Dy2LKzfOf8w%3D&reserved=0>
509.760.4474




--
Regards,

Dan Moore
Systems and Collections Librarian
Edmonds Community College Library
dan.moore at edcc.edu<mailto:dan.moore at edcc.edu> / daniel.moore at email.edcc.edu<mailto:daniel.moore at email.edcc.edu>
(425) 640-1526
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ctc.edu/pipermail/wactclc-alma_lists.ctc.edu/attachments/20190705/f3fc759c/attachment-0002.html>