question

Preface - I realize this is more of an Echo thing than an ASK thing, but the two are tightly coupled and there's no place to make standalone Echo requests. Currently, after a launch request or intent request to a service that doesn't end the session, the Echo will sit with a static blue ring (indicating it is listening for more input) until either it hears something from the user, or until it times out several seconds later. This is a great feature with third party skills because it tells the user that they are still scoped to the skill they previously asked for. Currently, however, if the Echo is muted, its visual behavior is a little bit different. Its default state is a red ring, and when the remote is activated, it switches to a blue ring. While it's "thinking" about the request, it does the rotating blue ring, and then once it's said its response, it drops back to the red ring, even though the session is still active. The problem, here, is that there's no way for the user to see that they are still in an active session, or to know when the session finally times out. This means that they may needlessly repeat the trigger word, or attempt to use an entirely different skill while scoped to an active session. Take for example a user using two made up skills, Fido the dog, and Mittens the cat: [b]tell Fido to speak[/b]... ("Woof!") [b]roll over[/b]... ("*rolls over*") [i](5 seconds elapse)[/i] [b]tell Fido to shake hands[/b]... That last comment has an unnecessary "tell fido to" prepended to it (because 5 seconds wasn't enough time to actually end the session), and depending on how that is mapped to an intent, that could be problematic. Even worse, though, is the skill switching case: [b]tell Fido to speak[/b]...("Woof!") [i](5 seconds elapse)[/i] [b]tell Mittens to play with yarn[/b]... In this case, we're actually giving input about Mittens to Fido, despite the user believing they have done everything correctly to interact with Mittens. This is almost certainly going to end in an error response, and a bad experience for the user. I realize this may seem pedantic, but in UAT I've repeatedly seen both of these issues occur, to great frustration for the users, and there's not really any way to "train" the users to avoid this. But, a little bit of UX tweaking can go a long way, so I'd propose that, even when muted, the Echo displays a slightly different pattern when a session is active. Maybe a mostly-red ring, with 1 stripe of blue? Or Maybe static red-and-white stripes? Or rotating red-and-white, kind of like the rotating blue-and-white used while the echo is "thinking"? Thoughts?