Emotionally Engaged Digital Assistant: Humanizing Design and Technology

The modern age that is ruled by AI, machine learning, and primarily data has granted us an opportunity. It is the opportunity to improve the existing barren human lives that are filled with numerous challenges. As a species, we have advanced and overcome numerous challenges throughout our history by progressing in Science and Engineering.
However, the world we know today that has been overtaken by technology is void of the fundamental elements that are quite inherent to the human species: care, empathy, accountability, accessibility, and inclusion. Without these fundamental elements, technology can only achieve so little while possessing the ability to change billions of lives around the globe.
In the fundamental manner in which our society operates, under the banner of capitalism, it has been quite difficult for many designers and creators of tech to include these fundamental elements and others like it. Consequently, we started to create generations of tech that catered to mostly a minority of the population and mainly the tech companies.
Being in the experience design industry helped me realize this fundamental lacking our technologies even more.

The experiences around most of our technologies these days lack the inherent touch that we, as humans, possess. Our technologies are vastly corrupted by bias and exclusion. However, there is an intense need to revert this.
The focus of this book is primarily on the digital assistants that are closer to us than any other technology. With their significant impact on our daily lives, it is important to direct some of our focus in the conversation around humanizing technology to digital assistants. The immense potential that this technology carries to assist us and take technology to the next level warrants the need for humanized digital assistants.

This book aims to grow awareness among its reader about the fundamental flaws present in the design and creation of most of the technologies these days. It aspires to become another voice, another torchbearer in the movement for humanizing technology. It is the new revolution in the tech industry that will shape the next generations of technologies.