Â鶹Éç

Abstract

The Â鶹Éç has had great success with smart speaker applications in radio, news and children’s content. In 2018 the Â鶹Éç delivered close to 20 million news briefings across ,  and  voice assistants.

In Â鶹Éç R&D, we’ve spent the last few years exploring rich media voice experiences. We’ve published interactive stories The Inspection Chamber and The Unfortunates, design guidelines and user experience studies. We’ve discovered that creating high-quality voice applications and interactive media for smart speakers contains a tough set of challenges, which require new kinds of teams and sets of skills.

• Â鶹Éç R&D - Voice Interfaces
• Â鶹Éç R&D - The Unfortunates: Interacting with an Audio Story for Smart Speakers

We’ve also seen a new type of role appear - the conversation designer – which contains elements of a product manager, audio producer, writer and user experience designer. A conversation designer needs to be able to design and script a voice app, but also to manage and deliver the product. It’s a demanding job!

In the face of all these knotty problems, we wanted to bring a panel of experts together to outline some of their fundamental challenges in designing for voice and share their top tips for success. So in February 2019, we invited a number of British voice producers to a workshop to discuss the challenges of creating voice applications for existing smart speaker platforms.

We’ve written a detailed report (downloadable above) from this workshop which is full of best practice tips on how to design rich-media content for conversational assistants. If you are creating a voice skill or application which goes beyond basic one-shot commands, we hope that the report can help you.

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• Â鶹Éç R&D - Emotional Machines: How Do People Feel About Using Smart Speakers and Voice-Controlled Devices?
• Â鶹Éç R&D - Talking with Machines
• Â鶹Éç R&D - User Testing The Inspection Chamber
• Â鶹Éç R&D - Prototyping for Voice: Design Considerations
• Â鶹Éç R&D - Prototyping for Voice: UI
• Â鶹Éç R&D - Prototyping for Voice: Methodology
• Tech Radar - The Â鶹Éç is working on an interactive audio drama for Alexa and Google Home
• The Verge - Â鶹Éç is making interactive radio plays for Alexa and Google Home
• Â鶹Éç R&D - Singing with Machines
• Â鶹Éç R&D - Better Radio Experiences

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