This week, we speak to conversation design master, Oren Jacob, about what it takes to create successful conversations with technology.

There are so many complexities in human conversation. When creating an Alexa Skill or Google Assistant Action, most designers try to mimic human conversation. Google itself has taken steps in this direction with the fabricated ‘mm hmm’ moments with Google Duplex.

But does all of this have an actual impact on the user experience? Does it make it better or worse? How natural is natural enough and does it matter?

What other factors contribute to conversation design that works?

PullString CEO and co-founder, Oren Jacob answers all in this week's episode.

In this episode on conversation design

We get deep into conversation design this week and discuss things like:

• How natural should conversations with voice assistants be?
• Why you shouldn't just try to mimic human conversation
• The power of voice and what tools designers need to create compelling personas
• Whether you should you use the built in text-to-speech (TTS) synthetic voice or record your own dialogue
• How any why writing dialogue is entirely different from writing to be read
• The similarities and differences between making a film and creating a conversational experience on a voice first device
• The limitations and opportunities for improved audio capability and sound design
• The importance of having an equal balance of creative and technical talent in teams
• What it all means for brands and why you should start figuring that out now

Our guest

Oren Jacob, co-founder and CEO of Pullstring. Oren has worked in the space in between creativity and technology for two decades.

After spending 20 years working at Pixar on some of the company's classic films such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo, Oren created ToyTalk.

ToyTalk was a company that allowed kids to interact with their toys through voice.

As voice technology progressed and voice assistants and smart speakers were shaping up to take the world by storm, ToyTalk morphed into PullString, the enterprise-grade conversation design platform.

About Pullstring

For over half a decade, PullString's platform, software, and tools have been used to build some of the biggest and best computer conversation in market, with use cases and verticals as diverse as hospitality to home improvement and Hello Barbie to Destiny 2. It was also used to create, the latest in big-ticket skills, HBO 's Westworld: The Maze.

Where to listen

• iTunes/Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• TuneIn
• iHeartRadio
• Pippa
• YouTube
• Any other podcast player you use or ask Any Pod to play VUX World on Alexa

Links

Visit the PullString webiste

Follow PullString on Twitter

Read more about how the Westworld skill was created

Check out the details of the talk Oren will be giving at the VOICE Summit 18

Check out the details of Daniel Sinto's demo of PullString Conversehappening at the VOICE Summit 18

Check out the VOICE Summit website

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