You can read this article in Spanish: Publicidad en interfaces de voz.

Advertising and its different formats have been the most lucrative business model in the content industry from its very beginning. Something like a lesser evil for many users open to “pay” the price for accessing content without directly spending money on it.

Alexa, Google, Siri, Bixby, or any other player in the voice technology world, are looking for alternatives to building a sustainable business model away from advertising. Especially when advertising is sometimes against their own policies. …

You can read this article in Spanish: Herramientas de diseño y prototipado para interfaces de voz

Let’s face it, most designers would be lost without their design tools. From the Adobe days to Figma, Sketch, Flinto, and so on, we always rely on software to get things done. When talking about voice interaction design (from now on, VUI), I still get the question about available tools and my preferred ones. In this post, I will categorize and summarize the most popular tools for design and prototype VUI experiences.

I have created a quick prototype with each of them with the…

In graphic interfaces, we are used to talking about design and interaction patterns. We use them all the time to deal with any user need. Those patterns are nothing but well-known solutions that users are already familiar with.

The boom of voice interfaces as a “new” interaction channel makes us wonder if there is any similar artifact in voice design that we can use in our VUIs (voice user interface).

Well, the short answer to the question is a big YES. …

In 2017 I published 2 articles about chatbot design where I talked about the importance of the assistant personality. The first one was about UX design tasks that are useful for designing assistants, and the other one was my viral Design Framework for Chatbots.

Most of my ideas there were inspired by the book Designing for Emotion, and the result was a persona document describing the assistant appearance and some of its traits.

Since then some other ideas have been published, like this very interesting work in Spanish called Voice System Persona Canvas which describes the different traits an assistant…

Now that countries are starting to reduce the confinement of the population for the coronavirus crisis, I would like to share the experiment that I launched in Alexa at the beginning of the pandemic. I believe this experiment is a great example of product design, including success, failures, and learnings, but more than anything, it’s proof that we can build a VUI product (voice user interface) with impact, in a short time and little technical knowledge.

So, let me walk you through my “Alexa, open Stay Home” project, every step I took, how I published, and the results I got.

The time frame for the project “Stay Home”

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In 2017 Alexa Echo Show was launched. It was the first smart speaker with a screen from Amazon, but not the last from a growing multimodal device ecosystem. Since 2017, 5 different devices with display have been on the market, multiplying options for the users but making it a bit more complex for those of us who live creating experiences on them.

The recommendations below are based on voice first interactions and don’t apply to situations where touch is the only possible option (keyboard for login, wifi setting, etc.).

While many agree on saying that design is the most important task in voice technology, others are still wondering why is a designer needed in a world with no screen. It sounds like a huge responsibility if we don’t know where to start!

There are already some posts talking about parallelisms between GUI and VUI design, like this one on how Heuristics applies to VUI, or this other one giving an overview of VUI design and things you need to take into account that can help you get started. …

You can read this article in Spanish: Cómo diseñar para voz con Situational Design y Airtable.

In May 2019, the evangelist team challenged the voice community with a new design methodology based on the context. It was called Situational Design.

Besides setting the framework for moving away from other design tools based on rigid flowcharts (inherited from traditional interaction design), they developed a card and storyboards system. The idea was to create a new design artifact that could become the new standard tool for conversation design.

In this post, I will explain why Situational Design is so important and how…