Breaking New Ground With Voice

The Opportunity Presents

Every once in a while an opportunity presents itself that changes the trajectory you’ve been traveling. Its newness is at once daunting and exhilarating. So many times in my young, 15-year career, I’ve turned the other direction, let others forge the path ahead. This time was different. I ignored the voices in my head, seized the opportunity and discovered a new voice, that of the voice experience.

Through this series of articles, I will chronicle my foray into the world of voice experience design via the Amazon Echo. Alexa has become a new member of my home. My 3-year-old son asks her to play his favorite songs, my wife wonders who I’m talking to in our home office, my 22-month-old daughter probably thinks I’m crazy…but here’s the interesting thing for me: my kids will grow up in a world where this is the expectation. Simply asking an inanimate object for something, or requesting that something happen, will now have a result. That is mind-boggling to someone who was taught the Dewey decimal system, researched reports in an encyclopedia, asked his parents about history and other worldly questions, and whose first development experience was getting a highly-pixelated triangle to move around the screen on the Apple IIE.

An Introduction to the Voice Experience

Amazon has provided a catalyst for bringing voice experiences to the masses. Sure Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Now, were all introductions to and familiarized us with the voice experience in our everyday lives. The difference here is that Amazon has democratized the process. They have opened Alexa up to the masses. Brands, agencies, students, and individuals all have the opportunity to break the box open, go under the hood and use the tools Amazon has provided to create their own voice experiences.

Why is this happening now? The technology has finally caught up to the intention. A true conversation that feels meaningful must be rich with information and lightening fast, or the person on the other side will feel something is broken, or that it’s simply, “too soon”. The credibility of the conversation is dependent on the illusion of interpersonal dialogue. If there is a disconnect from that illusion, the curtain falls and the user feels like they’re talking to a piece of plastic and wires.

Now is the right time: The technological infrastructure is in place and it allows for speed. Similarly, the informational infrastructure is in place that allows for breadth and depth. Every operating system is being rolled out with a voice experience. Apple helped expose this experience, even some of its growing pains, to the masses with Siri. And now we have Alexa, which has opened the door to a sea of interactions that will continue to expand the knowledge base and footprint of the voice experience.

While Alexa has found a home in the Amazon Echo and Fire TV, Amazon is making a much larger play here. Developers can incorporate the brains behind the beauty into any OS and even apps by using the Alexa Skills Kit. All of these applications help to strengthen the brain: the open source sharing informs the system, helps the knowledge base grow, and expands Alexa’s reach and importance in our daily lives.

Alexa, What’s For Dinner?

A simple inquiry we all face almost every day introduced me to the voice experience. Through our partnership with the Campbell Soup Company we, at Rain, were were tasked with bringing value to their recipe brand Campbell’s Kitchen and its many digital channels, and position them for growth in the coming years; Alexa and the Echo were the perfect fit. Our strategic plan included utilizing existing channels as well as new innovations such as Alexa and the Echo. We knew from our own experience and through research that consumers were seeking an answer to the familiar dinnertime dilemma, “What do I make for dinner?” This relentless question strikes fear into the heart of women and men every day. The quest is constant, the problem clear. We saw the opportunity for Campbell’s Kitchen to be the answer to that question, and be the authoritative voice in presenting the solution. And that is where we started: to make Campbell’s Kitchen the authority on “what’s for dinner?”

We created a recipe skill for Alexa using the hand-crafted, time-honed recipes put together by the staff and cooks in Campbell’s Test Kitchen and layered them with search trends, seasonal insights, social listening data, and user engagement across the Campbell’s Kitchen ecosystem. We boiled those thousands of recipes down into a curated customized list of the “daily top 5”.

Users select their entry point. They tell us how much time they have to prepare the meal and then pick the type of dish they’re in the mood for that day. Meat options: chicken, beef, turkey, pork; as well as seafood, vegetarian dishes, pasta and soup recipes are available for filtering. The user then gets their list, finds their way through the options, and picks the recipe that sounds most appealing. In seconds, it is sent off to the email address they provided when enabling the skill.

The experience is relatively straightforward, and quick. Which is exactly by design. Get the consumer the answer to their dinnertime conundrum fast. Drive them to Campbell’s Kitchen and help strengthen the relationship they have with the Campbell’s brands that inspire the recipes. And, in the short term, since launching in late October, Echo users have been finding their way and making great use of the skill. Strong analytics indicate we’ve tapped into something:

• Over 1,500 downloads (enables) of the skill in its first 48 hours
• Average 185+ users per day*
• Over 7,000 downloads (enables) total*
• Over 3,000 recipes sent to users*

*These numbers are from the first 9 days since launch of the skill.

New Experience With Familiar Roots

While the skill experiences we plan are short by design, the planning of a voice experience is rigorous in order to produce a thoughtful, useful and pleasurable end-result. We found this wasn’t wholly uncharted waters. It’s a new venture for sure, but with familiar roots in the strategic and creative experiences we’d been designing for years.

What is the real question at hand? How do we familiarize users with both the voice experience and this specific Campbell’s Kitchen skill at the same time? With a collective of invaluable experiences over our individual careers, our team was well-equipped for the task. Our stress on strategy and execution of visual experiences and designs was all applicable and important in the process of planning this skill.

There were also some new elements to consider:

• How do you guide a user from start to finish through a call and response process?
• How do you provide the user a sense of place in the experience, when they have nothing visual to ground them?
• How do you handle the freedom provided by a voice experience? You can’t always control what the user is going to ask for, but you have to provide a plan for how to handle it.
• How can you be concise without leaving holes that lose the user?
• How do you know when enough is enough and realize it’s time to close the experience?

We’ll explore these questions and more here over the coming weeks. I hope you share in my excitement at these new opportunities in our field, and that it ignites a spark in those that read this to give it a try. Amazon has done an amazing job of documenting the process of creating a skill. It requires working in tandem with a developer to help bring this to life (thankfully we have the best in the business here at Rain). If you don’t have the development skills, there are a number of resources you can turn to for help. And if you’re a brand or partner looking for help in bringing a voice experience to life, please reach out. (www.rain.agency)

Come Along For the Ride

I hope my excitement for this is contagious. I hope these posts serve a touchpoint as you start to craft your own voice experience. Regardless it will be cathartic to me as we here at Rain continue work into our next set of skills with Alexa, the Echo and the amazing team at Amazon that opened the door to this opportunity.

I look forward to seeing you again here soon. In the meantime, if you have a question, feel free to ask…and feel free to register for our webinar on the Design of Voice Experiences which will be held Feb 18. Register Here.

About the Author

Greg Hedges is the Director of Strategy at Rain, a digital marketing agency with offices in New York, Utah and Nicaragua. He’s worked the past 15 years in planning and building interactive experiences for clients, which include: Campbell Soup Company, National Retail Federation, Walmart, Electus, the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and Amazon.