Presented at FITC Toronto 2017 More info at http://fitc.ca/event/to17/ Mitch Seguin, Tribalscale Overview As voice user interfaces (VUIs) continue to emerge as a dominant new user interface, designers are experimenting with voice interaction over the traditional screen based UI. At TribalScale, they’ve seen quick success in the space building on Amazon Alexa and Google Home for brands like the PGA Tour, CBC, and Nascar. Mitch Seguin, head of product and design at TribalScale will walk you through what a VUI is and how to rethink the UI for a non-visual medium. Mitch will discuss learnings in this transition from traditional user interface to conversational interaction and demo some VUI work throughout. Objective To expose the audience to a new world of UIs in the conversational, voice controlled era. Target Audience Designers interested in experimenting with emerging UIs. Five Things Audience Members Will Learn What is a voice user interface Emerging VUI platforms and how they differ How designing for VUIs differs from traditional interfaces How conversational interfaces create a more human experience What the future of the UI could look like

2. Designing for Voice
The Next Generation of User Interfaces

3. API Proliferation1
The hardware is here and cheap
(far-field voice input processing (FFVIP) )
2
The science is ready for prime time
1. Natural language understanding
2. Automatic speech recognition
3. Text to speech
3
Why does it feel like conversational UI’s are exploding?
The popularity of VUIs
ML is making conversation easier4

4. Voice Platforms
The popularity of VUIs
Virtual Assistants Amazon Alexa Google Home Chatbots

5. My Favorite Skills

6. A Primer on Voice

7. Basic Mechanics and Architecture

8. Syntax
● Skill
○ When writing an app, or “skill” for the Amazon Echo, you
have to provide examples of how your users might
phrase their requests.
● Intent
○ Your app for the Amazon Echo is going to have one or
more capabilities or features. In the nomenclature of
the Amazon Skills Kit.
● Utterance
○ A spoken phrase that activates an Intent is called an
Utterance, and there may be many valid Utterances that
you will want to accept for each of your app’s Intents.
● Ask and Tell
○ Invoking a skill with specific intent.
○ Invocation name and request provided in a supported
phrase with “ask”, “tell”, and other phrases.

9. Our Journey with Voice

10. Botler

11. My Fridge

12. Early Adoption of VUIs

13. What We’ve Learned

14. No UI
People are unpredictable
Conversation is complex
Designing For Voice is Hard

15. Grice’s maxims
Threading
Implied Context
Designing For Cooperative Conversation
Repair
Acknowledgements and Confirmation

16. Tales From the Trenches

17. Tales From the Trenches
Anticipate incomplete information
Be helpful!
Acknowledge and confirm strategically

20. Find a subject matter expert
Take a systematic approach
Always be testing!
Tales From the Trenches

21. Respect the user The right use case
Basic Best Practices
This isn’t english class The right persona
VUI ≠ GUI Build the conversation

22. Offer a focused experience
Do’s and Don’ts
Validate your experience & utterances
Stay Cooperative
Repair the conversation
Use acknowledgements and
confirmation appropriately
Have Personality!
Translate touch to voice
Be rude
Lose context of the conversation
Turn people into robots

23. THANK YOU!
Goodbye.
Address:
48 Yonge Street | Toronto, ON Canada
Email:
contact@tribalscale.com
Website:
www.tribalscale.com
Twitter:
@tribalscale

24. Good Interaction Bad Interaction
Interaction Examples