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

Tue Jul 2 09:44:05 PDT 2019

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> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *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
> ------------------------------
>
> *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
>
> 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 / daniel.moore at email.edcc.edu
(425) 640-1526
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