Programming Pepper, a Humanoid Robot

Using DialogFlow, and Softbank’s proprietary software, this interactive robot with human features required scripts for VUI (voice user interface) and gestural programming. Made in France, and designed for an American way of speaking, we had interesting challenges to test and iterate on for the Australian accent and colloquialisms. Serving foremost as an in-person Q & A resource for library patrons, it also represented the city council as an ambassador of our shared venue, with a central library in the same building. Presenting different considerations than a voice-to-text search, or a chatroom-like interface, the humanoid features of Pepper brought forward different impressions users had about the relationship between robots and humans, where camaraderie, trust, and relationship-building were key components to a positive user experience.

Pepper - full.png — About Pepper the Robot

- 120 cm tall (approx. 4 ft)
- Can detect human facial expressions and emotions
- Conversational chatbot requiring manual programming and testing of verbal scripts, and also body language. A library of pre-programmed dances was included.
- As of 2016, there were 10,000 worldwide
- A touchscreen tablet on the front displays basic webpages to help the user find information they were looking for.
- Created by Alderaban (France) and Softbank (Japan) for American English. User testing of Australian accent and colloquialisms required scripted phonetic redirects.
- Default blockchain software QiChat for NLP and Choréographe to animate body language. After some testing and iteration, we opted for Google DialogFlow for the verbal scripts, as it displayed speech-to-text on the screen as an affordance for the user to adjust their query and arrive at a successful outcome.
- DialogFlow also created a transcribed chat log we could reference to diagnose misinterpreted queries and adjust the scripts for additional patterns and topics.

WCAG - Improving Web Accessibility

With a growing focus on “Digital Literacy” and “Lifelong Learning” there was an increasing organizational desire to ensure we were enabling library patrons and community members to have improved access to digital resources. This included educating older adults about cybersecurity, how to do online banking, and offering 1-on-1 help to people who found that their old way of doing things had moved online and made important tasks unavailable without a computer. What ever happened to the good old days?

Key recommendations:

• General overview of what WCAG is
• What content creators can do
• What Developers and IT can do
• Responsiveness

Marketing Automation + Streamlining

Streamlined workflows preventing duplication of work, such as:

• Rolling out scheduling software for bulk uploads of Facebook posts as CSV
• Introducing some coding skills to team for crossposting content without needing edits.
• Replacing difficult-to-fill Word docs and also allowing files to be uploaded within the same submission, rather than separately. Liaised with cybersecurity team to explore solutions. Allowed fields to have error modals, for higher-quality submissions and much less manual review.

Case Study: Request a Book

Every 2 years the library conducts a major public survey to understand our shifting role in the community, rising public needs, existing service gaps and new opportunities. With such an unusual year in 2020, with covid lockdowns causing branch closure, there were many pivots to online-only experiences, so actionable feedback related to our digital platforms and in particular a certain flow for requesting the purchase of items not yet stocked.

User Flow: Mapping the experience

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behaviour maps

How common are these different types of interactions? This journey would very quickly lead off our site to a vendor, so our tracking could only go so far, but a glimpse is shown below of our overall website traffic pointing to these tasks.