We’re launching Jovo Studios, a Global Network of #VoiceFirst Professionals
And it’s built on the blockchain. (just kidding)
Brands are getting ready for voice
If businesses haven’t paid attention to voice technologies in 2017, they most certainly do after this holiday season, which showed how fast Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are being adopted by mainstream consumers.
The Echo Dot was the #1 top selling item on Amazon, while you can also find Google Assistant on more than 400 million devices now. And at the distinctly voice-dominated CES this year, manufacturers of smart home devices, connected cars, and wearables showed off their Alexa and Google Assistant integrations.
Brands are realizing that it’s time to embrace voice as a key part of their product mix and omni-channel marketing strategy.
The problem
“It’s a very simple Alexa Skill” — everyone (including ourselves) before they’ve built their first one
While “happy path” (no error handling) voice prototypes are created pretty fast, it requires a fair amount of effort and experience to build robust and delightful voice applications. Conversational experiences are such a new and different form of interaction design that many brands are struggling to 1) figure out the best ways how to use voice for their business, and 2) execute that vision.
We believe to successfully work on voice projects, it’s important to have people with a diverse skillset (brand strategy, conversational design, voice app development) involved, which can be difficult to build in-house when it’s not a clearly defined focus of the company.
Brands are actively looking for help
It’s for these reasons that businesses usually end up looking for outside help. They can take several routes to arrive at their unique voice experience: They mostly reach out to either creative agencies (great at brand strategy) or development freelancers (great at voice app development). Both partners being specialists, they tend to lack one of the elements mentioned in the diagram above. There is also a growing number of voice agencies that specialize in VUI design (which do great work), however many are still starting out and take time to find their design and development process.
This results in a second layer of the problem: With no technological expertise in this field, it’s currently super difficult for businesses to 1) find the right people that combine the elements of a successful voice project and their specific use case, and 2) develop clear processes to help those entities work together and build something great.
And this is where Jovo comes into play.
Meet: Jovo Studios
Today, we’re officially launching Jovo Studios to address the problems mentioned above. Our goal is to create a network of the best voice designers and developers from our community to collaborate and build compelling voice experiences for brands around the world.
The ultimate goal is to match the right people to the right brands and equip them with the right tools to build something great.
Our process
The clear goal of each of our projects is to develop a process that helps voice professionals collaborate more effectively with each other and brands.
As many companies are lacking the technical knowledge to evaluate a project, there are currently a lot of empty promises made. This is why we’re working on ways to increase the transparency of voice application projects, build effective feedback channels between design, brand, and development, and add another layer of quality assurance to each of the projects that goes through our network.
Let’s work together and build some great stuff 🚀. Read more about Jovo Studios below, get involved as a brand or professional, or check out the website: www.jovostudios.com.
How Jovo Studios got started
As creators of the open-source Jovo Framework, it was always important for us to test our own tools and eat our own dog food. To make our product better (and have some fun), we started attending hackathons, where we experimented with solutions for verticals like SMEs and Insurances.
The combination of building a voice community and as well as exposing ourselves to other areas of the voice space opened the door for businesses to approach us in hopes of working together to build voice experiences for Amazon Alexa and/or Google Assistant based on our framework.
Although our initial reaction was “No” (we see ourselves as a product company building tools for developers, not an agency), we discussed this with friends and mentors and agreed that some types of projects make sense for our framework and for us as a company, as long as they lead to making our products and the better and contribute to the voice ecosystem.
And even more importantly:
Our community: An invaluable source of talent
What we love most about building an open source product is the community that can be formed around it. It’s so great to see all the talented and creative people work on voice apps with our framework, help each other, and collaborate.
In fact, we were so inspired by what people in the community are building, that we started experimenting with bringing in some of the Jovo community members to be a part of some of our projects.
This is just the beginning, and we believe in the opportunity of gathering great and passionate people to form an open collective of voice professionals.
How to get involved
For Brands
If you’re a business looking to work with Jovo Studios, please request more information here.
For Professionals
If you have experience with voice application design and development, please sign up here.
