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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.
We get deep into conversation design this week and discuss things like:
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.
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.
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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.
We get deep into conversation design this week and discuss things like:
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.
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.
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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Translating your Alexa Skill or Google Assistant Action is about more than translating the words in your script. It's about translating the user experience. Maaike Dufour calls this 'transcreating' and she joins us this week to show us how it's done.
The world is getting smaller. Technology has enabled us to reach and connect with people from every corner of the earth with ease.
Take this podcast for example. It’s listened to in over 40 different countries, most of which don’t speak English as a first language.
In fact, the vast majority of the world don’t speak English and certainly not as a first language.
Amazon Alexa is localised for 11 countries at the time of writing. 5 of them don’t speak English as a first language (France, Germany, Austria, Japan, India).
For global brands, having your Alexa Skill or Google Assistant Action available in every country you do business is a no-brainer. But even for hobbyists and smaller scale developers, think about the population of those countries and the potential impact you could have if you Skill was to do well in those locales.
We’re being guided through the importance of making your Alexa Skill or Google Action available in other languages and what steps you should take to make that happen.
We discuss why simply translating your Alexa Skill script won’t work and why you need to recreate the user experience in your desired language.
We cover some of the cultural differences between countries and give some examples of why that makes literal translations difficult. For example, the X-Factor in the UK is a nationally recognised TV show. Whereas, in France, it aired for one season and wasn’t well received. Therefore, referencing the X-Factor in a French Skill is pointless.
Maaike tells us about how, when transcreating your Alexa Skill, you might even need to change your entire persona due to the differences in how other cultures perceive different personas. For example, in the UK, a postman is simply someone who delivers mail. Whereas, in France, the postman is a close family friend who stops to chat and knows everybody in the street personally. In the UK, the postman is a distant stranger. In France, the postman is a close acquaintance. That makes for two entirely different personas.
We discuss examples of words and phrases that exist in one language but don’t in another and how that can both open up opportunities and sometimes present challenges.
We’re joined by Maaike Dufour, Freelance Conversation UX Designer, co-founder of UX My Botand supreme transcreator of voice first applications. Maaike, quite rightly, prefers to use the term ‘transcreate’ instead of ‘translate’ because simply translating the words that make up your Alexa Skill or Google Assistant Action won’t work, as you’ll find out in this episode.
Maaike has worked on voice first UX for a number of years. Having worked with the Smartly.aiteam, Maaike now works with Labworks.ioand is helping the team break into international markets through the transcreation of popular Alexa Skills such as Would You Ratherinto other languages.
Read Maaike's thoughts on Medium
Watch Maaike's talk at Chatbots and Voice Assistants London on YouTube
Follow Maaike on Twitter
Check out Maaike's website
Visit UX My Bot
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We speak to the creator of the world’s best chatbot about how to design Loabner prize-winning conversational experiences.
Steve Worswick is the creator of Mitsuku, the general conversation chatbot that has won the Loabner prizefor the last two year’s straight.
13 years in the making, Mitsuku passed the Turing testand convinced a panel of judges that it’s human over the course of a 20 minute conversation, two years in a row, to be crowned the world’s best chatbot and conversational agent.
It's featured in the Wall Street Journal, BBC, The Guardianand Wired. And, unlike most chatbots that focus on serving a specific set of use cases, Mitsuku is a general conversational agent. That means you can speak to it about anything.
This week's Flash Briefing question is from Brielle Nickoloff of Witlingo: What would an open source voice assistant look like? Send us your thoughtsand you could feature on the VUX World Flash Briefingthis week!What about voice?Although Mitsuku is a text-based chatbot, this episode looks at how to take Steve’s 13 years of experience in creating conversational experiences and apply that to the voice first space.
This episode is all about how to design and create a world-leading general conversational experience.
We get into detail about how Mitsuku is built (hint: it doesn’t use natural language processing or machine learning like most other conversational AI) and how Natural Language Processing-based conversational agents don’t quite hit the mark.
Steve tells us about Mitsuku’s rule-based supervised learning and how that’s leading to better experiences.
Despite Mitsuku passing the Turing test, Steve tells us why the Turing test is redundant.
We discuss user behaviour and how people treat a general conversational agent, from counselling to romance, bullying to marriage and money worries, and how to be sensitive on those topics.
We hear how varied responses can increase engagement. So much so that one person has spent 9 hours talking to Mitsuku!
We find out how to deal with pronoun resolution and how to refer back to what was said earlier in the conversation.
We uncover how brands are using Mitsuku as part of their conversational experiences, handing off to her when a user strays away from the use cases that their bot can handle.
We chat about how Alexa fairs against Mitsuku and hear where Siri would have finished if it was entered in to the Loabner prize competition.
Perhaps one of the most valuable lessons in this episode is the importance of persisting. Creating a conversational agent, a true conversational experience, takes time. It’s not a quick fix that you cobble together with a quick Alexa Skill. It takes years of development, iteration and constant improvement. But, if you stick with it, you might end up with the next best conversational agent.
Steve Worswick started out in IT support and built Mitsuku as a passion project on the side. 13 years of hard work and 3 Loabner prizes later, he’s now working at the world’s largest chatbot agency and provider, PandoraBots.
Contact Pandorabots
Check out Mitsuku on Pandorabots
Talk to Mitsuku
Check out Steve's talk at the Chatbots and Voice Assistants Londonevent
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, we're finding out how brands can get started and enter the voice first world of smart speakers and digital assistants.
Me and Dustin Coates are joined by one of the top US voice first agencies, Witlingo. We speak with two Lead VUX designers, Luciana Morias and Brielle Nickoloff, about how your brand can bridge the gap over to voice.
Brielle and Luciana share how they guide brands through the process of discovering their voice and establishing a voice first presence.
We discuss the new challenge of working out what your brand sounds like and how to determine whether to focus on voice first content or voice as a service.
They discuss how brands should be playing the long game and the challenge of convincing clients to start small and adopt a continuous improvement culture to grow their voice first capability.
We chat about figuring out whether your should repurpose existing content or create new and discuss some of the great guides to voice design that Witlingo produce, including the guide to making your Facebook content voice friendly.
Luciana Morais has a background in UX research and analysis and has a wealth of design experience. Now working at Witlingo as UX Lead and VUI Designer.
Brielle Nickoloff has a background in linguistics and has published a study on The use of profane threats and insults in the Anthropomorphization of digital voice assistants. Brielle is also Lead Voice User Experience Research and Design at Witlingo.
Visit the Witlingo website
Follow Witlingo on Twitter
Read Witlingo's VUI assessment guidelines
Read Witlingo's Facebook guidelines
Follow Brielle on Twitter
Follow Luciana on Twitter
Check out the Ubiquitous Voice Society
Read Brielle's paper: The use of profane threats and insults in the Anthropomorphization of digital voice assistants
It's about the interface stupid
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, me and Dustin are speaking with the Fresh Prince of AI, Frank Schneider, about how Speakeasy AI aims to deliver the promise of AI in voice (that’s a lot of AI’s).
How many people truly understand what their customers are asking for? Whether it’s in your Alexa Skill, your chatbot or in your IVR, you can’t hope to serve the needs of your users or customers if you don’t understand what they’re trying to do or ask.
Once you truly understand the current situation, you can realise whether you’re meeting your existing customer needs, and how well you’re doing that.
Through gathering understanding, you can also work out where you’re failing and where the opportunities for improvement or expansion are.
That then helps you improve and plan for the future.
Speakeasy AI is helping businesses understand what their customers are trying to accomplish on a wide variety of conversational platforms by extracting the intent from any conversation.
Its patent-pending technology, called Speech-to-Intent, doesn’t use the typical speech-to-text engine that most voice-first platforms use. Instead, it analyses the actual audio in real time through funnelling it through a pipeline of different ‘top secret’ micro services.
This means that low audio quality and accents have no effect on its ability to understand customer intent. Plus, it also allows for further understanding of context.
Dustin Coates and I hear from Frank Schneider, CEO, Speakeasy AI, about the current state of play in the AI field and touch on the amount of bullshit that exists right now.
We discuss how conversational understanding works and why speech-to-text might not be the most optimum way to capture intent.
We delve into the ins and outs of Speakeasy AI and get the low-down on its patent-pending Speech-to-Intent technology and hear how it could be a better way of understanding customer intents, regardless of audio quality or accents.
Frank tells us all about how Speakeasy AI can help businesses improve any conversational platform. He shares the opportunities that exist in the IVR space and how much untapped potential there is for businesses who’re willing to listen.
We've discussed VUI design for IVR with Simonie Wilsonrecently, and it would seem that you could use Speakeasy AI as part of a discovery piece of work to figure out where to start, then use Simonie's techniques to begin making improvements.
We also chat about the challenges of the AI industry and how working together could bring progress.
Frank was born and raised in Philly and, after spending 9 years in education, including teaching at a school for high school kids who committed felonies, he transitioned into technology sales and marketing, where he’s spent the last 13 years.
He’s consulted and led teams providing solutions in various SaaS and AI solutions for contact centers and B2B. He was the first sales executive at Creative Virtual USA and helped grow the team from 12 to 40 employees. After a successful exit, his former CEO is now funding his new venture, Speakeasy AI.
Visit the Speakeasy AI website
Follow Speakeasy AI on Twitter
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, me and Dustin are speaking with the Fresh Prince of AI, Frank Schneider, about how Speakeasy AI aims to deliver the promise of AI in voice (that’s a lot of AI’s).
How many people truly understand what their customers are asking for? Whether it’s in your Alexa Skill, your chatbot or in your IVR, you can’t hope to serve the needs of your users or customers if you don’t understand what they’re trying to do or ask.
Once you truly understand the current situation, you can realise whether you’re meeting your existing customer needs, and how well you’re doing that.
Through gathering understanding, you can also work out where you’re failing and where the opportunities for improvement or expansion are.
That then helps you improve and plan for the future.
Speakeasy AI is helping businesses understand what their customers are trying to accomplish on a wide variety of conversational platforms by extracting the intent from any conversation.
Its patent-pending technology, called Speech-to-Intent, doesn’t use the typical speech-to-text engine that most voice-first platforms use. Instead, it analyses the actual audio in real time through funnelling it through a pipeline of different ‘top secret’ micro services.
This means that low audio quality and accents have no effect on its ability to understand customer intent. Plus, it also allows for further understanding of context.
Dustin Coates and I hear from Frank Schneider, CEO, Speakeasy AI, about the current state of play in the AI field and touch on the amount of bullshit that exists right now.
We discuss how conversational understanding works and why speech-to-text might not be the most optimum way to capture intent.
We delve into the ins and outs of Speakeasy AI and get the low-down on its patent-pending Speech-to-Intent technology and hear how it could be a better way of understanding customer intents, regardless of audio quality or accents.
Frank tells us all about how Speakeasy AI can help businesses improve any conversational platform. He shares the opportunities that exist in the IVR space and how much untapped potential there is for businesses who’re willing to listen.
We've discussed VUI design for IVR with Simonie Wilsonrecently, and it would seem that you could use Speakeasy AI as part of a discovery piece of work to figure out where to start, then use Simonie's techniques to begin making improvements.
We also chat about the challenges of the AI industry and how working together could bring progress.
Frank was born and raised in Philly and, after spending 9 years in education, including teaching at a school for high school kids who committed felonies, he transitioned into technology sales and marketing, where he’s spent the last 13 years.
He’s consulted and led teams providing solutions in various SaaS and AI solutions for contact centers and B2B. He was the first sales executive at Creative Virtual USA and helped grow the team from 12 to 40 employees. After a successful exit, his former CEO is now funding his new venture, Speakeasy AI.
Visit the Speakeasy AI website
Follow Speakeasy AI on Twitter
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, we’re finding out how content creators can have their podcasts and YouTube content indexed and searchable on voice, with Bryan Colligan of Alpha Voice.
With the podcast industry thriving and more people listening to podcasts than ever, more brands are starting to launch their own podcasts. Podcasts are a perfect fit for devices like the Echo and Google Home because they provide ambient entertainment, similar to the widely popular relaxation sounds skills.
Two problems face podcast and content creators: how do you make your podcast discoverable in the first place and how do you allow people to search through your backlog of episodes in order to find something that interests them?
Podcast discoverability is almost as much of a problem as Alexa Skill discoverability. Although Google is beginning to do its bitto help podcasts be discovered online, what about on voice?
This is the problem Alpha Voice aims to solve.
Help others get their skill passed first time by sharing your skill certification stories: Send us your tipsand you could feature on the VUX World Flash Briefingthis week!What is Alpha Voice?Alpha Voiceindexes your podcast or YouTube content and makes it all searchable on Alexa via your own Alexa Skill.
And it’s not just the podcast titles and guests you can search for. You can search for anything at all that interests you and the platform will search within your content to find your search term, then recommend that episode for you to listen to.
We’re talking to Alpha Voice co-founder, Bryan Colligan, about how the platform works, how he and his co-founder built it and what value it gives content creators.
We also get into detail about how the VUX of search works on voice: processing and serving potentially hundreds of search results. How do you determine which ones to display to the user?
We also discuss:
We wrap up by telling you all about the VUX World Alexa Skill, built using Alpha Voice! (U.S. only right now but will be available in EU soon.)
Bryan Colligan is an entrepreneur and the co-founder of Alpha Voice. Bryan is based in Silicon Valley, has founded a series of startups and has been helping startups create mobile apps and improve their SEO for the last 10 years.
After reading the Mary Meeker internet trends report and learning that Google can understand 96% of what humans say, Bryan has turned his attention to the voice-first world.
After a number of failed experiments, he stumbled across the idea for Alpha Voice and is now helping content creators have their content found on Alexa.
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This week, we’re getting deep into voice analytics and will help you learn more about how you can understand the performance of your voice first experience.
One of the biggest benefits that technology has given us is the ability to understand. To understand whether our latest PPC campaign had an impact on sales. To understand whether our new website increased our leads. To understand whether our pricing tweak made a difference on click through rates. To understand whether our foray into Facebook is sending more traffic. To understand whether our customers are satisfied.
Tools such as Google Analytics have been providing this kind of value to website owners for years. Tracking where your users come from (Google, Facebook etc), what they do when they arrive and whether they convert are the cornerstones of understanding website performance.
With the introduction of new mediums such as conversational chatbots and voice first applications on platforms such as Alexa and GoogleAssistant, how do you understand the performance of these things?
How do you know if your Alexa Skill or Google Action is successful? Send us your answersand you could feature on the VUX World Flash Briefingthis week!Can you apply the same rules as the web? Can you even access the same data? Is there some new metrics that matter more? And how can you use all of this to understand and improve the performance and use of your product?
Well, that’s what you’re about to find out.
We’re speaking to Dashbot.ioCEO Arte Merritt all about the conversational analytics platform and how you can understand whether your conversational experience is working for your users.
We discuss the kind of metrics Dashbot provide including:
Arte tells us some case studies of how the tool has been used to understand and then improve conversational experiences.
We discuss some of the challenges with conversational analytics and how they relate to the voice first space and we hear about where voice analytics are heading in the future.
Arte Merritt has worked in mobile and analytics for 20 years. He built an analytics platform which he sold it to Nokia before turning his attention to fill a gap in the market when he realised that Slack didn’t have any analytics. Dashbot was born and its been serving conversational designers ever since, helping them understand and improve their chatbots and voice applications. Since its creation, Dashbot has analysed 32 billion messages and counting!
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This week, we take a look at the similarities between VUI design for IVR and VUI design for voice assistants. We also explain what VUI tuning is and why it’s important, whilst giving you some tips on how you can tune your voice user interface. We also discuss PinDrop and voice first security.
We speak to one of the world’s expert VUI practitioners, Simonie Wilson, to get under the hood of Passport and figure out what it is, how it works, why it’s needed and how you can use it to authenticate users with confidence whilst preventing fraud.
We also tap into Simonie’s vast VUI design experience and discuss how she goes about designing VUIs that delight rather than smite customers. We get into detail about the benefits of VUI tuning and Simonie shares her advice on how you can continuously improve a VUI experience.
Are brands failing on Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant? Send us your answers and you could feature on the VUX World Flash Briefing this week!Privacy and securityPrivacy is often cited as a barrier and a challenge in the voice first space. How do you authenticate a user, build trust and enable people to transact in a frictionless way, all without a long, drawn out, failure stricken on-boarding process?
PinDrop is changing that with it’s product, Passport: a fool-proof way to recognise whether someone is who they say they are simply by the sound of their voice. It works in all voice first areas and can even tell whether the voice is synthetic.
Here's an example of it working with Alexa:
There is so much potential in the voice first space from a vcommerce, health and financial management perspective that technology such as this could smooth over the cracks in the verification process and enable people to transact more seamlessly in a voice first world.
Simonie Wilson is the queen of VUI design. With over 20 years experience working in the speech and VUI design space, Simonie's career has included working with large companies such as Microsoft and GM, small companies such as startups and contracting too. Simonie has knowledge and experience in the VUI design space that few others do and is one of the few people to have extensive experience with VUI tuning.
Simonie is madly passionate about VUI design and, in this episode, shares all of that passion and some real lessons and insights from her experience that’ll help all VUI designers improve what they do.
Visit the PinDrop website
Check out PinDrop on YouTube
PinDrop on Facebook
PinDrop on Twitter
Connect with Simonie on LinkedIn
Email Simonie
Read about PinDrop Passport in Forbes
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From the publisher's feed
Interviews with the best brains in AI, sharing how to improve customer experience and business operations using emerging AI technologies such as voice AI, conversational AI, NLP, Large Language…
We educate business leaders and teams on why and how AI technologies are revolutionising the way consumers engage with businesses and the internet, why that matters and how to implement it properly.
Bradley Metrock, Score Publishing
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