Giving Voice to Your Product

When your user sits down to use your product, they already know what they want to accomplish. They communicate this via taps, clicks, and swipes. But what if they could just ask?

We'll discuss using Natural Language Understanding to add a conversational interface to your product, and cover the basics of making machines that can talk. Giving voice to your product means transforming it from a tool into a teammate, and it gives your users the ability to express their desires in the simplest means possible.

Transcript

1. GIVING VOICE TO YOUR PRODUCT Matt Buck CTO & Co-founder, Voxable
2. What is a Conversational User Interface?
3. Textual Messaging Apps Vocal Voice-first Devices Multimodal Computers, Smart Phones, IoT, VR, AR Conversation is the Main Mode of Interaction
4. Talking to Machines - Your users already know what they want - Usually communicate what they want by clicking, tapping, and swiping - What if they could just ask?
5. Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
7. I V R
8. Interactive Voice Response
9. 1700s: Early speech synthesis • 1779: Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein models vocal tract • 1791: Wolfgang von Kempelen’s “acoustic- mechanical speech machine” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Wolfgang_von_Kempelen's_Speaking_Machine
10. 1846: Euphonia • Created by Joseph Faber • Also played like an organ • Modeled entire head • Spoke three languages https://irrationalgeographic.wordpress.com/ 2009/06/24/joseph-fabers-talking-euphonia/
11. Alexander Graham Bell https://irrationalgeographic.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/joseph-fabers-talking-euphonia/
12. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ 64416865@N00/5451405887/in/photostream/
13. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ 64416865@N00/5451405887/in/photostream/
14. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ 64416865@N00/5451405887/in/photostream/
15. Why Should I Incorporate Voice Into My Product?
16. Let’s Talk Numbers - Smart speakers are the fastest-adopted consumer technology in history - Global market will top 200 million units sold by end of 2019 - More smart speakers will be shipped this year than smartphones - Largest players: Amazon, Google, and (soon) Samsung
17. Ubiquitous Computing
18. Wired for Speech - Most of the brain is devoted to speaking and listening - Going to be one of the primary means of interacting with technology - No more heads-down phone fiddlin’
19. Add a Little Magic to Your Product
20. How Do Voice Interfaces Work?
21. The Core Technology Listen Understand Process Respond The Conversational Interaction Loop
22. - Automatic speech recognition (ASR) - Text input and messaging app affordances The Core Technology Listen
23. Where Does Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Happen? Browsers - Web Speech API Alexa Google Assistant Siri
26. Understand Natural Language Understanding (NLU) gives meaning to text and extracts structured data The Core Technology
27. What Does Natural Language Understanding (NLU) Do? “Show me an event about CUIs happening at Affinipay 
 this evening” location time USER INTENT: EVENT SEARCH intent:event_search topic
29. Where Does Natural Language Understanding (NLU) Happen? NLU as a service happens in platforms like Dialogflow (API.ai), LUIS, Rasa, and Watson Built into platforms like Alexa Custom built by a team of data scientists and linguists
30. Process Bot intelligence manages the context of the user, the application, and the conversation The Core Technology
31. Respond - Audio feedback - synthesized or recorded voices - Messaging app affordances The Core Technology
32. The Core Technology Listen Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Messaging UI Understand Natural Language Understanding (NLU) Process Bot Intelligence Respond Synthesized Voice Messaging UI How CUIs Work
33. How Can I Give My Product a Voice?
34. Audit Your Functionality - List in terms of user goals - Think in terms of users’ mental models - Choose use cases well-suited to voice - Determine channels
35. Choose a Team - Voice is very interdisciplinary - Need stakeholders, PMs, marketers, engineers, and designers
36. Conversational Design Process - Write sample dialogues - Build flowcharts - Conduct Wizard of Oz tests - Consider voice and tone
38. Analyzing Performance - Conversational analytics platforms: Dashbot, Chatbase, etc. - Custom analytics - NLU model quality: QBox.ai
39. The Future of Talking to Machines
40. Want to Learn More? - Book recommendations: - Conversational Design - Designing Voice User Interfaces - How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation - Get to know the platforms - Come chat with us sometime - we love talking about this stuff!
41. howdy@voxable.io Hit us up for coffee & talking about talking to machines if you’re ever in Hyde Park!