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

[Thomas, Kirsti]

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





From: Wactclc-primo <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>; 'WACTCLC Primo discussions' <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] on behalf of Guidry, Wade [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


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