Outwhiz
Category: Education
Year founded: 2013
Summary: Outwhiz uses Delight API to build voice-control for their iOS and Android app. Users can launch, search and navigate the Outwhiz app using Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa and Bixby.
Introduce your app and tell us your story.
We are an education app that helps students practice Math and English. What makes us different from everybody else in the category is as our students complete their learning missions, they can unlock real rewards like Amazon and iTunes gift cards.
Imagine how much you would love Math as a kid when every time you practice Math, you could earn points towards getting your favorite toy?
Since 2013, millions of lessons have been delivered to students and we have been featured in places like Forbes and Teachers First. Parents use our app to motivate their kids to learn, and teachers use our service for curriculum enrichment and automated grading.
Why are you using Delight API?
With so many people using things like Alexa and Google Assistant, we wanted our users to be able to talk to these voice assistants and control our app.
Parents and teachers are some of the busiest groups of people, so we wanted to provide them a way to get things done in our app with just voice. Some students do hundreds of exercises a day on our platform. If we can shave a second off their UI navigation time every interaction, it adds up to a lot of user convenience.
Also, our apps are on both iOS and Android. Since we set our goal to empower as many of our users as possible with voice— whether they are on Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant or Bixby — we have to leverage a cross-platform API like Delight. It would take too much work and time for us to build on each platform separately.
What is the user experience like?
We used Delight API to integrate voice assistants into the Outwhiz app. Basically, you can say any of the following things, and the Outwhiz app will launch and show what you asked for:
Start a task: “Hey Siri, do math”
Find content: “Alexa, tell Outwhiz to find multiplication exercises”
Go somewhere: “OK Google, ask Outwhiz to go to rewards store”
Here is a video of how it works:
What was integration like?
Integration was straightforward and documentation was good. Here are the steps:
- Sign up at Delight website. Choose industry and voice assistants.
- The website generates deeplinks or zipped manifest files to download, specific to each assistant.
- Our app already handles deeplinks. So for platforms like Alexa, we are all set.
- For platforms that need manifest files like Siri and Google Assistant, we just plugged the downloaded files into XCode / Android Studio.
- For each voice command, we pasted a few lines of template code to launch the correct view controller.
Done.
What are the advantages of using Delight API?
The biggest advantages for us were:
- Cross-platform for voice assistants — a solution that works across Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa and Bixby
- Cross-platform for iOS and Android
- No NLP / natural language processing necessary
- Analytics included — we needed to gauge usage and measure engagement
Any recommendations to developers new to voice?
- Getting something up and running quickly. For quick prototypes, you can check out Delight’s Creator and Sandbox, which works complementary to Delight API.
- Get feedback from early adopters.
- Try voice in a variety of ways. We are actually using other parts of Delight API to build rich experiences on smart speakers and smart displays too. We aspire for Outwhiz to deliver educational experiences everywhere, all the time.
