Amazon Alexa
MLP Workout Feature
How might Alexa improve the workout experience on a smartwatch?
Fitness is top of mind for many folks these days and wearable tech like smartwatches give us better insights into how active we are. To better understand how Alexa could best support wearable owners, we conducted a survey to see how customers use their smartwatch and want to use their smartwatch for fitness. We leveraged these findings to design a lovable workout experience for Fossil.
Guiding Principles
Be concise but conversational with fitness stats instead of direct and data-driven
Be encouraging, but not opinionated
Celebrate a customer’s progress
Enable customer choice via customization
3 Ways We Improved Workouts with Voice
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Real-time Updates
During a workout, the voice assistant proactively reads out the customer’s 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 their surroundings with a proactive, verbal update.
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Workout Summary
Post-workout we introduced workout summaries that are trigged once a customer taps end workout or asks Alexa to end the workout. Included in the summary is an update on goal progress, top stats, and encouragement to acknowledgment the workout logged.
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Workout Goals
With Alexa, 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 the number of workouts 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”
Alexa: Starting a workout in 3, 2, 1 (earcon+haptic)
< At the 1 mile mark >
Alexa: (earcon) [1] mile completed. Your heart rate is [165] beats per minute. [You got this!]
< At the 2 mile mark >
Alexa: (earcon) [2] miles completed. Heart rate is [154] beats per minute. [Nice job!]
Customer: “End my run” or taps GUI buttons
Alexa: (earcon) [Way to go!] You reached your weekly fitness goal! Your total distance was [2.2] miles. Total workout time [24] minutes, [57] seconds. With an average pace of [8] minutes, [30] seconds. And 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. After all, Alexa’s personality strives to be clever, relevant, and make our customer smile. 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.
Keep it up!
Let’s go!
Get it!
You got this!
Great job!
Awesome job!
Nice work!
Way to go!
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