Brands: making the most of smart devices
We are in the infant stages of the next big change in the way everyday consumers interact with their devices and therefore interact with your brand. While the technology may have been around for a while, we are now seeing consumers in their thousands buying smart devices that allow them to only interact with it using voice.
As a brand, what do you need to do to make an effective use of this technology?
1. You need to have brand guidelines around your tone of voice. You will need to define how you want your action / skill to portray your brand to the user. Do you want to be friendly, chatty and funny, or formal and informative? Check out the GC Facebook messenger bot for an example of how humour can work.
2. You need to have an invocation name. This name needs to be between 2–5 words in length and both memorable and linkable to your brand. With Google Assistant, it is also important to look at the questions a user may ask that you would like to be linked to. For example; “Hey Google, I would like to meditate” is a great invocation for Headspace. https://www.headspace.com/
3. You will need a main call to action. If creating a voice app, what is your single focus? Both Google and Amazon say that the best VUI’s they see only have a single purpose and do this well. Do you want the user to get information about your brand or to be able to purchase your latest product/service?
4. You will need a way for the VUI to interact with your existing services. If you want to sell something is there an API available to post transaction data to? If you’re giving out information, can this be easily accessed from your website? This will make development time shorter and be easier for you to maintain the information, as you will have a single truth.
5. You will need small talk. All voice assistants will be asked a variety of questions that are nothing to do with what it does and it is nice UX to have answers. Google’s Dialoglfow has a very extensive list of the commonly asked questions and you can input a few answers for each. This will also link back to your brands tone of voice. How do you want your brand to appear when answering these questions.
On the 21st Feburary I spoke about some of the points above at the #GCFable event in London. The video of that talk is below!
Thank you for reading. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any comments, suggestions or thoughts, ether on here or I’m @simonsmale on twitter.
