Fitness Voice Assistant
How might a wearables voice assistant (VA) improve the fitness experience?
Fitness is top of mind for many folks these days and wearables give us better insights into how active we are. To better understand how a voice assistant could best support wearables owners, we conducted a survey to see how customers use their smartwatch and want to use their smartwatch for fitness. We leveraged the findings to make customer informed design decisions.
Guiding Principles
Be concise but conversational with fitness stats over direct and data-driven
Be encouraging, but not opinionated
Celebrate customers progress
Enable customer choice via customization
3 Ways We Improved Workouts with Voice
-
Real-time Updates
During a workout, the voice assistant proactively readouts the customers’ workout stats. While this information is available at a glance on the watch, real-time updates allow the customer to stay focused and aware of your surroundings with a proactive, verbal update.
-
Workout Summary
Post-workout we introduced workout summaries that are trigged once a customer taps end workout or asks the voice assistant to end the workout. Included in the summary is an update on goal progress, top stats, and of course encouragement to acknowledgment the workout logged.
-
Workout Goals
With the voice assistant, we wanted to offer weekly goals. The smartwatches do a great job of showing progress toward daily goals but we saw an opportunity to track number of workouts per week and/or distance covered per week to provide long term support for achieving health goals.
The Workout Experience
Scenario: Customer goes out for a run and has enabled real-time updates (for distance, current heart rate and motivation) and workout summary (for total distance, duration, average pace, and calories)
Customer: “Start my run”
Voice Assistant: Starting a workout in 3, 2, 1 (earcon+haptic)
< At the 1 mile mark >
Voice Assistant: (earcon) [1] mile completed. Your heart rate is [165] beats per minute. [You got this!]
< At the 2 mile mark >
Voice Assistant: (earcon) [2] miles completed. Your heart rate is [154] beats per minute. [Nice job!]
Customer: “End my run” or taps GUI buttons
Voice Assistant: (earcon) [Way to go!] You reached your distance goal for this week! Your total distance was [2.2] miles. Total workout time [18] minutes, [32] seconds. With an average pace of [8] minutes, [30] seconds. You burned [215] calories. [Nice work!]
Encouragement
DESIGN HIGHLIGHT
In the research we learned that the majority of customers appreciated encouragement during and after their workouts. To help the experience feel more dynamic, we randomize encouragement to offer variety and created a bank of phrases that aligned with our guiding principles.
Encouragement of course is personal and at this time we don’t have the intelligence to be a personalized coach, so we designed an experience that would celebrate the progress made and feel conversational vs data driven (stats only).
Rules: Use all phrases before repeating a phrase. Always include SSML markup for excitement.
Great job!
Awesome job!
Nice work!
Way to go!
Bank
Keep it up!
Let’s go!
Get it!
You got this!
My contribution included:
Concepting
Facilitated research
Created research protocol
Synthesized research findings
Conversation design
Documentation
Concept Validation Study
Synthesized study findings