麻豆约拍

For two years, we've been creating the 麻豆约拍's first synthetic voice. Computer-generated, it's helping us as a public service broadcaster to dip our toe in this new technological space. The voice is designed to be used across a wide variety of 麻豆约拍 outlets, reflecting our core editorial and brand values.

Once we made the voice, we began looking for opportunities to test it with our audiences. Not only did we want to showcase our synthetic voice, we also wanted to explore whether we could use it to begin conversations with audiences. How does speech recognition fare with the wide range of accents across the UK? Can we see a future where audiences could have a conversational relationship with the 麻豆约拍? A quiz was the perfect opportunity to start to test these questions out.

• 麻豆约拍 Taster - Play Beat the Bot

The 麻豆约拍's brilliant line-up of presenters and on-air talent will always be at the heart of our content. But we think there's also a role for a synthetic voice to augment them. A synthetic voice could power interactive quizzes with almost limitless questions and challenges. It could improve the accessibility of existing content. And it could help create new content individually personalised to our users.

James Fletcher, Editorial Lead, Synthetic Media and Conversational AI

Sports Quizzes

Quizzes are participation experiences in their purest form. And we know our 麻豆约拍 Sport audiences love doing really obscure and competitive quizzes, the harder the better...

The surge in DIY Zoom quizzes during the pandemic may have fizzled out, but a whole host of TV quiz shows with high production values have taken their place. Amidst quiz fever, we started to think about making a quiz that showcased our new synthetic voice and allowed audiences to participate using their own voice too.

Beat The Bot

So we created Beat the Bot, a web-based voice quiz where you have to guess the names of all the Premier League teams that have ever been relegated. You play in turn against the bot, with no room for error. The bot is never wrong.

Beat the Bot is a testbed for launching the first of many voice-enabled experiences that audiences can engage with through their browser on their desktop or smartphone using their in-built microphones. We also made sure that audience privacy is un-compromised, which is key in creating a safe environment for more experiences like this in the future.

Jamie Chung, Executive Product Manager

Does using your voice make a quiz more engaging?

We wanted to test a hunch that using your voice would give the quiz more jeopardy and deepen engagement. When it works well, using your own voice provides a frictionless experience. By reducing the effort needed to type answers and correct spellings, gameplay can happen at a natural pace. However, if the speech recognition doesn't understand your accent and you are saying the right answer, a voice quiz can be more frustrating than a text-based one. Using your voice to complete a quiz may be a novel experience for many of our users; given that this is the first voice web quiz for the 麻豆约拍, we had to overcome some design challenges.

One of the biggest UX challenges when designing Beat The Bot was indicating to the user when it was their turn to speak. If a user isn't sure when the microphone is listening and speaks too soon or too late, it can spoil their chances of winning. So we used visual clues in the interface to alert the user when it's their turn to speak and a circular countdown timer that slows ebbs away, telling the user how much time they have until the microphone will close.

Paul Jackson, UX Designer

What did people think?

After two weeks of being live on 麻豆约拍 Taster, we had a completion rate of 67%, and 65% of people played it more than once. The mixed success of speech recognition has had an impact on playability for some people; we're aware this is an area that needs improving before voice quizzes can be rolled out on a larger scale. But the numbers of users retrying the game demonstrate that the format works. Once we can improve the speech recognition for a broader range of British accents, the format could be repeated for a wide range of quizzes across the 麻豆约拍.