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Giving Voice to Your Product

Voxable
August 22, 2019

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.

Voxable

August 22, 2019
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Transcript

  1. Textual Messaging Apps Vocal Voice-first Devices Multimodal Computers, Smart Phones,

    IoT, VR, AR Conversation is the Main Mode of Interaction
  2. 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?
  3. 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
  4. 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/
  5. 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
  6. 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’
  7. - Automatic speech recognition (ASR) - Text input and messaging

    app affordances The Core Technology Listen
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. Process Bot intelligence manages the context of the user, the

    application, and the conversation The Core Technology
  11. Respond - Audio feedback - synthesized or recorded voices -

    Messaging app affordances The Core Technology
  12. 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
  13. 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
  14. Choose a Team - Voice is very interdisciplinary - Need

    stakeholders, PMs, marketers, engineers, and designers
  15. Conversational Design Process - Write sample dialogues - Build flowcharts

    - Conduct Wizard of Oz tests - Consider voice and tone
  16. 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!
  17. [email protected] Hit us up for coffee & talking about talking

    to machines if you’re ever in Hyde Park!