Voice Weekly Issue 6: September 21, 2018

by Andrey Esaulov

A free, once–weekly email roundup of Voice news and articles.
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📰 News and Stories

Amazon Hardware Event 2018 - One of the best roundup of bombshell event by Amazon comes from TechCrunch. The authors had the hands-on experience after the event in the Amazon's HQ. And that's what you'll learn: What devices exactly were introduced? A list! Why Amazon wants you to build your own modular HomePod? What is the reasoning behind the new design language APL (Alexa Presentation Language) that would help build Alexa skills for devices with screens? How this event could be seen as an answer to Google Home being the best-selling smart speaker for Q2 of this year?
TECHCRUNCH

Introducing the Alexa Presentation Language (Preview) - Customers embrace voice because it’s simple, natural, and conversational. When you build a multimodal experience, you combine voice, touch, text, images, graphics, audio, and video in a single user interface. Combining voice and visual experiences can make skills even more delightful, engaging, and simple for customers. You can provide customers with complementary information that’s easily glanceable from across the room. Or you can use the screen to enrich your voice-first experience and reduce friction for customers. For example, you can offer visual cues for confirmation or show lists of items during a content search experience.
PAUL CUTSINGER

2nd Part of the Series: How we designed it: the Google I/O ’18 Action for the Google Assistant - The post continues the series that we introduced last week. Nice peek into the design thinking process at Google.
SACHIT MISHRA

📓 Tutorials and Opinions

VIDEO: Design without interface - the future of experience design - Voice is the world's most intuitive interface. Raffaela will share how to apply UX principles to the platform without interface to build delightful voice experiences. She will share 5 actionable tips for your first voice design project and provide a humorous take on ethical concerns in voice experience design.
RAFFAELA REIN

UX London 2018 - The Future of Voice - Voice user interface expert Cheryl Platz deconstructs the shortcomings of today's voice user interfaces in order to chart a path towards a future of amplified humanity.
CHERYL PLATZ

5 Tips for Using Intent History to Enhance Your Alexa Skill - Intent History is a powerful tool that introduces a new dimension of insight into how customers are engaging with your Alexa skill. If 10 or more customers have interacted with your skill in a single day, Intent History will provide aggregated and anonymized details about what customers have said and how these requests were handled by your skill’s interaction model. Not only does this information help you understand your customer base and the things they most frequently say to your skill, but you can also use Intent History insights to improve your skill’s interaction model and provide even better user experiences.
KYLE O'DONNELL

📆 Upcoming Events

bots.cologne #13 Mark Webber in a box by soundreply & Create Skills with BotTalk (September 26, 2018, Cologne - Meet the author of these lines in Cologne next week 🗣