Jetstar’s Jess Welcomes Us To The Future

In reality, virtual assistants have already been with us for a while now: the voice on the other end of the phone when you call the bank or the internet provider, the animated paper clip bounding forth to offer assistance with your Word document. In short, they have established a formidable reputation for ineptitude. It is hard to imagine them achieving either the understated competence of the Star Trek librarian or the psychopathic self-awareness of HAL. Instead, one imagines their empty robotic smile beaming away as the computer fails to understand your most basic questions. But this brainless and overenthusiastic first generation of virtual assistantry is already on its way out. Next-gen helpers like the iPhone’s famous Siri combine much-improved speech-recognition algorithms with hints of a wryly ironic sense of 21st century humour.

As this indicates, improving technology makes the design choices that go into a virtual assistant all the more salient. If the virtual assistant is not useless/stupid, its other qualities start to matter more. So what should it look like? The pulsing red eye and monotone voice might be out, but how human should the virtual assistant appear? And what kind of human? Jetstar’s answer to these questions has recently come to sit towards the bottom-right of its website. Her name is Jess. I feel somewhat gross characterising Jess in human terms, but as you can see from the picture, she might be described as an attractive young Caucasian female. She wears what appears to be an orange uniformtop and has her hair pulled back in a modern style. All the same, Jess is not an especially realistic portrayal of a human. She is clearly a computer graphic.

In fact, Jess is an avatar of the Nina platform, a virtual assistant program developed by Nuance, a company with wide experience in speech recognition and something it calls ‘intelligent systems design’. The basic premise is that most people want to interact with computers more like Captain Picard does. Certain dead-enders might be happy pounding away with their keywords, but as Nuance product manager Adam Spence puts it, “most people prefer a human-like interaction”.

Since Nina is intended for a variety of businesses across different industries, its outward appearance and the variety of interactions it is programmed to handle are highly customisable based on the company’s needs. In other words, Nina is not inevitably Jess; it could just as easily be an angry old man, a talking aeroplane or a croaking frog.

Jess is all Jetstar. “It’s a choice they made relative to how Jetstar wants to portray their brand,” Spence says. But in general, he adds, the decision to use a human avatar versus, say, a paper clip, is meant to encourage users to interact in a human style. “There’s a fine balance between making people aware that they’re talking to a system as opposed to a person and encouraging them to interact in a way that’s using natural language. Using an avatar encourages people to ask full questions,” he says.

On a mobile, voice-operated platform like an iPhone, Siri can talk. But since Jess is text-only, for now, she needs a face. It doesn’t have to be an attractive, young female face, but I guess it might as well be. After all, Jess looks quite a bit like a presumably real Jetstaremployee prominently pictured elsewhere on the website.

Jess doesn’t only have a look though. Like Siri, she has at least the suggestions of a personality. Prior to researching this article, I’d been tipped off about the fact that Jess is prepared with some fun responses to off-topic queries of the romantic nature. If you’re wondering why a pleasant-looking but not very realistic portrait of a travel agent needs comebacks to pick-up lines, then you obviously haven’t been spending much time online in the last 15 years.

So I click on Jess and, feeling more uncomfortable than I expected, type in ‘I love you’. Instinctively, I look behind me to see if my wife is watching.

“Wow! That’s sweet,” Jess replies. “I love cake but that doesn’t mean cake and I are meant to be together. How can I help you with your Jetstar booking or question?” Despite this rebuff, I press awkwardly on, asking Jess to marry me. “I’m a virtual agent, not a person,” Jess replies. “Also, we only just met. ” To this, she adds one of those winky-smiley emoticons so that I know it’s all good – we’re just being crazy on the internet. Then she asks again how she can help with my booking or question.

Is Jess already married? “To the job,” she says. Where does she live? “In the cloud. ” How old is she? “Old enough to know better, but young enough to try it again. ” This gets me another winky emoticon.

All good fun, I guess. Jess is starting to remind me of a bartender, and I am starting to feel sort of dirty.

But as I try to turn the conversation towards less weirdly personal matters, it emerges that Jess isn’t exactly a broad conversationalist. Politics, cricket – none of the stuff your averageAll good fun, I guess. Jess is starting to remind me of a bartender, and I am starting to feel sort of dirty. Australian might want to chat about gets anything more than a sort of error message from Jess. Ask about her favourite movie and Jess turns obtusely business-like, offering a link to the in-flight entertainment options. Ask what she thinks about Nelson Mandela and she replies: “Hi Nelson. ” I hardly exhausted all possible conversational angles, but it appeared that the only thing Jess was programmed to deal with, besides flight stuff, was weird romantic come-ons. If this speaks to Jetstar’s assumptions about Jess’s audience, they’re probably right. It’s kind of a sad commentary, but then again, even on Star Trek the nerdier characters did occasionally fall in love with robots and holograms.

Needless to say, Jess ought to be evaluated based on her job performance rather than her looks and her wits. Unfortunately, based on my admittedly brief testing, she might do better as a bartender.

Starting with something simple, I ask Jess about baggage, a common question often buried on airline websites and just the sort of thing Jess ought to be helpful in finding. Indeed, asked about the baggage allowance on a domestic flight, Jess responds with a brief overview of Jetstar’s baggage policy and a link to more detailed information. This link is the same one that comes up on top of the results if I plug ‘baggage’ into the website’s old-fashioned search bar.

Interestingly, if I only give Jess the word ‘baggage’ instead of spelling out my question, she notes that I appear to be entering a keyword and says that she can be more helpful if I form a complete sentence. Some might find thisfrustrating, but it does point to the potential usefulness of the virtual assistant in helping those less familiar with the internet’s keyword vocabulary navigate the web in plain English.

Next, I want to ask Jess about Jetstar’s newly acquired Boeing 787 Dreamliner. This much-hyped aircraft has hit some heavily publicised bumps since its rollout. Is the 787 Dreamliner going to catch fire? Jess doesn’t seem to understand. Though she does offer me a link to information on the 787, she also gives me a link about what to do if I’m sick on the day of travel.

Well, that’s another thing that could go wrong, and I don’t really know the answer. So now that you mention it, Jess, what should I do if I get sick? Instead of pointing me back to the link she just gave me, she suddenly despairs. “It looks like my suggestions haven’t been helpful,” she says. “Could you please try rewording one more time?” Okay, never mind about getting sick. Is the 787 safe? This time, Jess responds with a link entitled ‘Can I carry on my item or does it need to be checked?’ Not exactly what I was looking for.

Finally, I revert to what Jess didn’t want on my baggage search, typing in the keywords ‘787 Dreamliner’. And suddenly she perks up, giving me a paragraph about how excited Jetstar is to have the new aircraft in its fleet and providing a link to more information.

When it comes to questions about Jetstar’s schedule or routes, this virtual agent is again rather limited. When does Jetstar fly between Melbourne and Sydney?“Jetstar fly to so many places” that “it can be hard to keep up!” Jess replies. Then she provides a link to the airline’s route map, which is also available by clicking a prominent blue banner on the home page.

When I ask if Jetstar flies to Darwin (it does) or Boston (it doesn’t), I get the same response, which is not very helpful. You’d really like Jess to be able to tell you whether Jetstar does or does not fly somewhere, and ideally give you some sense of the schedule or at least the frequency of those flights.

As it is, people unfamiliar with a standard website interface may find Jess useful in locating things like baggage information, but it’s hard to see what she brings to the table for most other users, except of course those who are gluttons for romantic rejection.

On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine how Jess could be a lot more useful on a mobile platform, where smaller screens make traditional navigation difficult. Although the current website version is text-only, a voice-activated mobile Jess is in the works. So too is a multilingual Jess scheduled for rollout to Jetstar’s platforms across Asia in 2014.

In the meantime, Jess will continue to be monitored and improved. According to Spence, a key functionality in the Nina platform is the ability to alert engineers to questions Jess is being asked but isn’t able to answer.

For the moment, Jess has her flaws. But be respectful. Given what we’ve seen of the future, it’s never too soon to start building goodwill with virtual assistants.