Backstories/01: Amazon Astro’s Voice?

Justin James Lopez:
Hey everyone. Welcome to Amazon BackStories, a behind the scenes podcast that allows us to get a sneak peek into the people and design decisions behind various products and services across the Amazon ecosystem. This episode will be hosted by Donald Burlock, Jr. and features Chelsea Titus and Mike Forst as we explore the voice design behind Amazon Astro. Let’s hear their story.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
Hey everyone. Welcome to Amazon BackStories. We are so excited because we have two really special guests here with us today. I’m personally very excited because I know both of them. And I believe by the end of this episode, you’re going to be really excited because you’re going to get to know them as well and also learn about some of the incredible work that they’re doing at Amazon. So I’d like to extend a very warm welcome to Chelsea Titus and Mike Forst. Thank you so much for being here.

Chelsea Titus:
Thanks for having us, and I’m very excited to talk with you, Donald.

Mike Forst:
Yeah, same. Thank you so much, Donald. Appreciate it.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
Fantastic. Well, let’s ease into it because there’s a lot to talk about. I have a lot of questions and I’m sure that you all have a lot of responses. So maybe we just start with intros, and Chelsea, if you could share a little bit about yourself and maybe just share what you do at Amazon.

Chelsea Titus:
Yeah. So I am a conversation designer at Amazon. I have been working on Astro my whole time here since September 2020, and I have been in conversation design since the early 2000s, and a fun fact about me is I have blue hair.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
The audience should definitely see some amazing photos of Chelsea. She has really, really cool blue hair. We’ll come back to that later. Mike, what about yourself? Give the audience a little bit of an intro.

Mike Forst:
Yeah, sure. I’m senior UX and sound designer on the Coro team, consumer robotics team. I’ve been working on Astro for four and a half years, I think now, and I guess a fun fact about me is that I have no hair.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
I have two of the coolest looking people here at Amazon hanging out with me today. I really mean that.

Mike Forst:
Wow, thank you.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
Yeah. All right. Now that we got some laughs in and the audience is probably wondering, what the heck is consumer robotics coming from Amazon, right? We certainly have seen some things out there from Amazon in terms of really cool gadgets every year. Amazon, of course, presents really cool gadgets to the audience, but let’s maybe take a step back and let’s talk about Amazon Astro, because both of you mentioned Astro and it just kind of casually rolls off the tongue because obviously you all are really into it, you’re working on it. But for our audience, let’s talk about it. So maybe, Chelsea, if you want to give us a little bit of a background on Amazon Astro and what that’s all about.

Chelsea Titus:
Yeah. I was going to say it rolls off our tongue because we’ve been living and breathing it for our entire time at Amazon. So Amazon Astro is Amazon’s home consumer autonomous robot that is a companion, and then also can help monitor your house, can bring people things, can go to different rooms. What am I missing, Mike?

Mike Forst:
Yeah. So like you mentioned, its got its own personality, its got its own character, so Astro’s just a fun loving robot who is really just an eager robot to help. And there’s other functionalities that we’re pretty proud of these days, which is a lot around the security side of things. You’re able to use the companion app to log in and check up on your home while you’re away. It can monitor your home autonomously. There’s just a ton of stuff that our fantastic little buddy can do.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
Oh my gosh. It sounds so cool. All right. I actually have to confess to the audience that I knew a little bit about Astro coming in to today’s conversation. Of course, together, we’re going to learn a lot more, but one of the reasons that I was so excited to get the opportunity to chat with these two people today is that the Astro program is actually one of the more exciting things that I feel Amazon is pushing the boundaries on. So we’re going to get into Astro and we’ll chat a little bit more about all of the aspects of Astro. Mike, you just mentioned personality. Our audience loves to hear about narratives. Obviously for anyone who’s in our room today and checking out this episode, they’re all about narrative, they’re all about story.

And I think one of the really good segues to talking about our little buddy, I’m going to start saying little buddy through the rest of the episode. I don’t know if that’s appropriate, but I really love that, Mike, is to talk about narrative. Let’s say on that topic for a little bit, because we have a consumer robot, and we say consumer only because when we think about robots, I’m sure most of us go into a really either industrial direction or perhaps we go into a direction that’s very sci-fi fiction. We always do that, generally speaking, but when we hear the word consumer and we think, as Amazon employees, so much about our consumers. And then you hear the word robot, they juxtapose themselves in such a way that people are probably asking a lot of questions about what’s the story, not only behind the people bringing this robot to life, but also the story of this little robot rolling around my house.

So let’s go there. Let’s talk about narrative because we know our customers, they tend to make a subconscious story based on the actions of what a product might be doing. And it could be obviously our customers who are really familiar with Alexa, and when Alexa comes into a conversation and the customer is asking them a question and wants a response, right? But in terms of an autonomous robot and, Chelsea, you really emphasized that word, autonomous. We see perhaps a robot that’s doing things in our home, clearly has some sort of subconscious narrative going on, but your team is focused on putting a lot of intentionality into what that robot is doing.

I want to hear a little bit more about what type of impact does this make for our customer experience when we start thinking about how autonomous things in our home go about creating their own narrative and how that translates to what customers think about those products. So let’s maybe start there with Astro. Astro’s rolling around your place. How do we start to put intentionality into what Astro is doing so that our customers feel really confident in the narrative that’s being shared?

Chelsea Titus:
I absolutely adore this question and I don’t think it’s hard, because we’ve put a lot of thought into this on our team. Mike, John Otta, another person on our team, and I especially, when we come up with a new functionality that Astro can do, or we have any sort of new thing that we are creating and creating the user experience for, we actually first write the story from Astro’s perspective and try to really understand what Astro is thinking, what Astro’s motivations are. Pre me, the team came up with character traits about Astro, and we think behind every decision we make, we really keep the motivations of Astro in mind, and then hope that we can tell that story, and that story comes across to our customers.

This is a huge shift in user experience because, especially for me, I’m always thinking about the user. But if you think about the user from the perspective of a robot who wants to please the user, it makes for even better design, because the robot and the user are in this symbiotic relationship where the robot’s wanting to please the user. And so if we’re thinking about it from Astro’s perspective, then we’re going to make the right choices for the user while being able to tell a really powerful story.

And I think that you’re probably going to get to this, but Astro doesn’t have a voice, only has nonverbal communication sounds. And with this amazing team of animators, sound designers, user experience designers, conversation designers, human robot interaction, all of that, we are able to tell that story. And it’s been amazing to see customers reactions to Astro because they get the story, they understand what’s going on. There’s been some news articles and things, and it’s the character that stands out, and I think it’s because our team so intentionally put thought into what is this character and what does this character want to do? And if the character wants to please its family, then of course, we’re going to be thinking about users. So it kind of flips the script, but in a really interesting and provocative and exciting way.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
So cool. And honestly, I am even more curious about how the non... I was saying nonverbal before, but I actually think it’s deeper than that, and curious about how that became a core tenet. I imagine perhaps throughout the research, it became more apparent how critical that type of communication was going to be. Chelsea, can we share a little bit about how the team has gained those learnings to inform Astro, being what Astro is, in terms of this nonverbal communication?

Chelsea Titus:
Yes. When I started, the refrain was, oh man, I wish we had a TTS for Astro. And the decision was made way before my time, and maybe even before Mike’s time, I can’t remember, that we were going to use Alexis TTS. And it was interesting because we have this character of Astro and then we have this character of Alexa that people really know really well. And we just wish that we had had our own TTS. But now, thinking back on it, I think that limitation actually helped us make a really fascinating and interesting character because we had to rely on sounds. We had to rely on movement. We had to rely on those animation tricks.

And so by doing that, we created this robot who is able to communicate with all of these things that people communicate with day to day without using actual spoken word, and Astro relies on that. And that’s a huge part of what makes Astro so endearing. So having that limitation actually helped us create a better character, a better interaction, and I think has really pushed us to think a lot more about nonverbal communication and how we can do that. And the fact that we have this thing that... It’s movements can tell you what it means, it sounds can tell you what it means, it’s eyes and animation can tell you what it means, and we don’t need TTS in the way that Alexa devices need a TTS. And that’s really exciting. My background’s in linguistics and the fact that I’m like, as little TTS as possible, which is text to speech for those who don’t know, the least amount of talking that we can do, the better character and the better our robot is. And we’re hearing that loud and clear from our customers.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
So Mike, let’s come back to you. We heard Astro makes a lot of sounds and in some ways, Astro actually has a voice, even though it’s non-verbal communication. And we understand that’s helping to build an emotional connection with our customers. So our customers, for the most part, are Amazon customers. They know the identity of Alexa, but I’d like to hear more about how the team strategically aligned on the sound identity of a robot.

Mike Forst:
Yeah, sure. So when I joined, there were no sounds on the device yet. We hadn’t really aligned on exactly what that means to have sound on a robot. You know, there’s obviously a ton in movies and in TV around what a robot sounds like, and that is kind of the mental model for what a robot sounds like. So early days, I started by exploring a ton of different sounds. I tried everything from recording my own voice to using guitar pedals and talk boxes and synthesizers and trying to use existing TTSs that we have in the system and basically everything you could possibly imagine. But really what it came down to was kind of harping back to this idea of story and trying to figure out where Astro’s voice comes from from Astro’s perspective. And so when it all started to kind of come together was directly after I wrote a little story around Astro’s voice, and so I’ll just read it real quick. It’s just a quick little blurb here.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
Oh man, this is beautiful. Let’s hear it.

Mike Forst:
Astro was not given a verbal voice, but since it’s a resourceful robot and really wants to be able to communicate clearly it took Alexa’s ear cons, or essentially the UI sounds that Alexa has, and created its own voice. So when you hear these sounds, you’ll notice that they sound similar to Alexa’s different notification sounds, and essentially kind of give it its own unique sonic identity by pitching and moving and inflecting the sounds to sound like they’re coming from Astro itself.

One of our core tenets, obviously for character, is that all of the things that we do kind of come from within. And so in a lot of these instances, we just kind of tried to find sounds that sounded natural on the device. And this just so happened to be that way. And with that, we have these very tonal sounds that Alexa makes. It stays inside of the Alexa ecosystem, essentially, but it has its own character. And I really wanted to lean into having it sound musical as well, to make it sound more friendly. And so we stayed inside the Alexa musical side of things and kept it in C major as well.

So it’s very pleasant, everything kind of sounds very nice, and so that’s where we landed. So essentially it came from writing that story and having a sense of how Astro is actually communicating versus how we’re just sticking sounds on it.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
That’s really amazing because I would say to have our designers intentionally thinking about the story from the perspective of this object that now is becoming a part of your home, that’s really incredible. I don’t know if we see that necessarily in so many other aspects of design. We often start with the user and maybe that’s where it ends. And so there’s not necessarily a relationship, as you said, Chelsea, a symbiotic relationship, that is created between user and said object, in this case, Astro. So that’s amazing.

And I want to dive a little bit deeper into the intentionality behind these actions that the character’s taking. We think about this often from maybe what we see in movies and see in shows. But I actually feel like it’s doing something even more. It’s building trust. And so of course, one of our leadership principles at Amazon is all about earning trust. And often we, as Amazon employees, talk a lot about how do we earn trust with our customers? How do we keep trust? So in this way, I feel like not only are we only are we keeping trust with our customers, but we’re trying to help trust be established between Astro and the home, the people in the home, the kids, the pets.

So can you talk a little bit more about these types of actions, maybe more specifically for the audience, to help everyone understand how you’re building trust between what Astro’s doing and what people are experiencing in their home? Whatever you can share. I’m sure there’s some secrets that we probably should leave out, but just to give an example or two of what you were just sharing there for the audience.

Chelsea Titus:
The other fascinating part of this, and thing that you have to remember, is because it’s autonomous, the robot does things on its own. So when you think about designing for Alexa, even when Alexa does things that are, you know, plays an alarm or gives you a reminder, any of those things, the user has proactively asked for those things. Whereas with Astro, Astro can, on its own, come into your kitchen to hang out or be by the family. So Astro’s goal is to be part of the family, to be integrated with the family.

And the way that we think about that is how can Astro do that? How can Astro be proactive without being creepy? And I think that there’s a lot to be said for our form factor, but there’s also so much to be said for the character. So when we think about, like right now, we have greetings, right? So if Astro sees you, it proactively greets you, and he’ll say things like, good morning, Chelsea, or I missed you, Chelsea, which is my favorite. Every time it tells me that it missed me, I’m just like, oh, even though my team decides that, it just makes me really happy.

Going back to thinking about Astro’s intentions, if Astro’s intentions are to be a part of the family and to please the family and do what the family needs, that’s not going to be creepy. So if we always think from that perspective, I think it’s going to just help us make better decisions. I’m interested, Mike, to see if you have anything to add to that.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
And Mike, before you jump in and address the audience, we have to acknowledge that there’s probably some folks in the audience who are nodding their heads saying, yeah, creepy is a word that came to mind at some point. So I think to build off what Chelsea just shared about the intentionality, I would love to hear a little bit more from your perspective about how does this team determine as you’re writing out the narrative for Astro, what’s creepy, what’s not creepy? Oh, that could be a bit creepy. Maybe we should test that. Did we test it with enough people? Ooh, does it still come across creepy, but we should do it? I hate to make you the person that addresses the creepy comment, but let’s do it. Let’s go there.

Chelsea Titus:
You want Mike to address it or do you want me to address it?

Donald Burlock Jr.:
Let’s have Mike address it. I think that would be fun.

Mike Forst:
Yeah, sure. So I think the biggest thing for us is transparency. We’re dealing with robot’s rolling around your home. It could be in spots that you don’t necessarily know it’ll be there, so you’re kind of trying to gauge where the robot is in the home, all of the different pieces of the puzzle. So as Astor’s driving around, we do things like communicate where it’s at by actually emitting a sound from the device so we can localize it. So there’s, again, just another way for us to not have the device be kind of sneaking up on you. The hardware team did such a good job about making it quiet, we ended up kind of getting feedback around that and again, just trying to address that through sound.

I think there’s other things too, that we’ve done from a character perspective and the animation team, which they’re just fantastic, kind of led the charge on this. So other ways of communicating motion intent. So for instance, if the device is going to turn left, right before it turns left, its head turns left, so you kind of get that visual cue that it’s about to turn left. And that’s just some classic animation tricks that the animation team has brought from their past.

I think another thing too, is there’s a lot of tricks that kind of come from animation from just kind of examining characters and trying to figure out ways to make the device communicate outwardly. Obviously, like Chelsea says, it has a character voice as well, and it has eyes on the device. So again, we use those three tools, the motion, the eyes, and the sound to really try to communicate as much as possible outwardly. For us, it’s just constantly growing and we’re adding more and more. And I think at this point too, like for us, we’re looking at it from how can the character support the CX and how can we even further communicate what the device is currently doing? That way, when we look at the device, maybe it’s got squinted eyes and its head’s moving back and forth, and so okay, the device is searching for something. And so now we kind of, again, communicate exactly what that device is up to. So again, couldn’t harp more on transparency and communication through the character.

Chelsea Titus:
And Donald, you brought up research. We definitely are doing user research. We bring users into the lab, we have a beta program, and usually we will do some sort of lab research and take information from that and then make design decisions to go to beta. But sometimes it’s the other way around, where we will design something and then we will get feedback from our beta participants that it’s not quite working. And so then, it’s just design, it’s always iterative. And so then we’ll go back to the drawing board, try to fix things, go do some more research, bring people into the lab, and then go back out to beta. And then once it passes through beta, then we can go out to the public.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
Chelsea, let’s come back to you, and let’s just maybe help the audience understand what got you guys into this team? How do you sign up at Amazon to work on the future of consumer robotics in the home?

Chelsea Titus:
Now, when people interview for this job, we can tell them that you’re working on consumer robotics, and this is Astro, and we can introduce Astro to people. When I interviewed, and especially when Mike interviewed, it was a highly confidential project. And so-

Donald Burlock Jr.:
Secret mission.

Chelsea Titus:
Yeah. So you go through your entire process, just hearing that this is a cool, innovative thing that Amazon is working on and you have some clues, but you don’t know. I was very lucky that I know quite a few people at Amazon and quite a few of those people were disclosed. And so they did not tell me what I would be working on, but they all told me that it was really, really cool. And so I was able to take that information and make the decision to join the team. The other big part of that is that I met numerous people on the team and it got me so excited about work again. That’s the best part. I mean, I work on a robot. That’s really cool, but my team is just amazing. And that came through when I was going through the interview process, so it just made me really excited to join.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
That’s incredible.

Chelsea Titus:
My first day when I found out what I was working on, I was floored. So it was cool.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
That’s an incredible story. Yeah. We always talk about day one at Amazon, but then when your day one is actually the day you have the job revealed to you, that’s pretty incredible. Mike, what about you? Do you want to just share a little bit about your narrative in terms of joining the team?

Mike Forst:
Yeah, it’s very, very similar. Definitely did not know exactly what I was walking into, though my interview process, I think we had some extra interest in the work that I did on Cosmo, the Anky robot, and a few of my other projects there. So it’s kind of like, hmm, I think maybe, but not exactly sure. But obviously, just like Chelsea, first day, when they told me, I remember I started with two other people, and I remember the three of were on one side of the table and everybody else was on the other side of the table and we were just kind of staring like, oh, all right. Yes. And then the questions started rolling out. Where were we at? And at that point we were very, very early days. So a lot of interesting problems to solve from the get go. But yeah, couldn’t have been more excited at that point to work on a brand new, first of its kind product. Yeah.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
Wow. So incredible. I mean, there are so many incredible things that we were getting into about Astro. I think what I leave with today is just the amount of discovery that is happening within this team. Such a unique team. Obviously we have two really unique individuals who are contributing to the design of Astro and the narrative that Astro is showing us, but even more so to just hear the boundaries that the team is pushing. So we’re unfortunately coming very close to the end of this episode. I feel like there should be a part two. I don’t know how you guys feel.

Chelsea Titus:
I feel like we didn’t even scratch the surface.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
We tried to scratch the surface, that’s really tough. So maybe, Chelsea, just with the last 30 seconds, if you could just maybe give the audience one thing that you would love for them to leave with after today’s episode focused on how Astro’s come to life.

Chelsea Titus:
I think the idea that you create a character and design from the character’s perspective has changed the entire way that I design and has made me an infinitely better designer, with the core tenant being that the character wants to please the user.

Donald Burlock Jr.:
Amazing. Yeah. Well, I’m sure this audience that’s listening to Amazon BackStories knows it’s all about by design and not by default. So with that, we are so thankful, Chelsea and Mike, for joining us today. We hope everyone really enjoyed the episode. Maybe there’s a part two. We’d love to hear from you. And if you’re looking for the link, it’s going to be just below in this episode. So check it out, share it. And hopefully we’ll have a few Astros rolling around in our home really soon. So thank you so much, guys. I hope you had fun today.

Chelsea Titus:
Thank you.

Mike Forst:
Thank you, Donald.