Why Professors at MIT, Syracuse, and Others Use Sayspring in the Classroom
Voice interface design is an important new skill.
Something is changing on college campuses across the US. Engineering experts that, one year ago, would have struggled to apply their skills to make useful, scalable market-ready voice products, are prototyping and testing voice skills live.
Here at Sayspring, our aim is to make voice design easier and more accessible by creating a platform that gets users testing voice designs with minimal effort. With students deploying Sayspring voice interface designs in multiple classrooms across the country, that’s exactly what is happening.
The incredible potential of a voice design education
Sayspring is easy to learn, even for novices in design, voice and AI engineering. Instead of spending time (and prerequisites) teaching students complex engineering skills and complicated design tool ecosystems, within minutes of downloading the tool, TAs and professors are using Sayspring to start teaching voice design.
1. Learn voice without any coding.
Students can join the thousands of developers already designing voice skills without needing a master’s in Engineering first.
2. Students go from downloading to creating to demo-ing an interactive voice skill in minutes.
Sayspring’s easy interface makes creating voice designs quick and easy. And with the Sayspring Amazon app, you can demo your voice design on any mobile device.
3. Students can preview and demo voice prototype on an Amazon device.
Designing for the user? With Sayspring students can start user-testing on Amazon devices within minutes of completing their project.
4. Get a transcript of any voice design.
Sayspring can generate transcripts of any conversation flow created on the platform. Students and teachers then can evaluate the designs in transcript form and in live demos.
5. Students can easily share with their classmates, TAs, and professor.
Classrooms who opt into our student plan can use our sharing functionalities to share their work with a click.
6. Multiple students can work on one voice design project.
In the team/student plan, multiple users can collaborate.
7. Direct access to the Sayspring team for a personalized plan for your classroom.
E-mail us! The setup is quick and simple.
8. Responsive support.
Our support team is small and nimble, and aside from a great archive of hyper-specific support documents, Sayspring support is ready to help when you need it.
Platforms that are easy to use are easy to teach
In the early days of mobile, creating usable, testable mobile app prototypes was difficult. Until platforms that made iterating through a design process more possible, mobile apps were sub-par. Before a voice prototyping platform like Sayspring existed, voice design was a cluttered mess of flowcharts, mp3 files, frustration and sub-par voice experiences. Designers and design students alike had to learn on the go.
Now, students can create and interact with conversation flows in their browser or on an Amazon Echo speaker within minutes of signing up for Sayspring. By creating voice prototypes that place design and the user at the center, this next generation of students will change the way voice is used.
The next great voice interface designer is sitting in a classroom creating prototypes
Voice is such a new career path, with a huge amount of potential. As such, there are going to be more positions than applicants. 5,000 people are currently working for Amazon Alexa, and over 20 million Amazon Alexa devices have been sold, and that number is growing. When it comes to voice interface designers, there are maybe 3,000 in the field right now by some estimations.
At Sayspring, we know that voice first technologies are nothing without a design process. We created our platform to bring design into voice technology, and we’re glad to see this process and our technology are already being adopted at universities across the US.
Originally published at www.sayspring.com on November 14, 2017.
