Voice Assistant

When I dived deep into voice design, I researched on the different voice assistants in today's market and the purposes they serve. I focused on Amazon's Alexa voice assistant and learned how to program a few skills from the Amazon Developer console. To go about this project, I conducted market research, created voice personas, user flows, wireframes, usability tests and multimodal interaction, with an emphasis on user privacy, safety and accessibility. My first skill was a haiku reader and my bigger skill was a kitchen assistant called Recipe Expert, a voice app that allows users to find quick recipes, detect ingredients on their smart pantry, suggest recipes and add ingredients on a user’s Prime Fresh cart.

Designing a voice assistant that is able to distinguish ages of users from their voice profile and preventing age-restricted content to the youth are important elements for designing a good voice assistant. To minimize inappropriate requests and chit-chat especially when designing for children, responses need to be funneled through a diverse team of conversational designers who will be highly influential with the process of vetting responses from voice assistants so that they can effectively communicate with children in an educational and nonchalant manner when questions about serious subject matters arise.

In a nutshell, working on this project immersed me into voice design from a developer's point of view. I learned about the importance of voice intents, programming a voice skill, and why privacy and accessibility are important factors for designing a good voice assistant. To get a downloadable version of my project click on the link below.