We are all excited about Voice-Enabled Devices. But how much do we really use them? Want to make sure that your Voice Application is not just one of the 25K skills out there? In this session we share our experiences from prototyping and critically building over a dozen Voice Experiences to meet business needs. We show how practical decisions have made implementing great UX easy, and share open source tools that we have built to help others do the same.

1. Building Great Voice Experiences
@VineetSinha
Vineet Sinha, Emerging Tech R&D, Salesforce Immersion

2. Voice is a natural interface
for us to work with
Computers

3. Voice is a natural interface
for us to work with
Computers

4. Voice can be a Natural User Interface
Voice Interactions Today
Which restaurants are nearby?
Here are a few popular restaurants: ...
Which restaurants nearby serve alcohol?
Here are a few popular restaurants: ...
Typical Human Interactions
Where can I get dinner?
We have a few great Italian, Korean, and Indian
restaurants close by. Are you interested in any
of them?
Yes, but which ones they have alcohol?
Among restaurants that serve alcohol, we have
…
Most voice apps today just work in a command-response manner
- In part because tooling focuses around low-level APIs
 Engaging Voice Apps prioritize User Experience

5. 4 Parts to a better User Experience
1. Understand what you are building
 Don’t just rebuild web use-cases
 Make sure you understand the pain point
2. Be hyper-agile
 Narrow your focus to iterate faster
 Deploy and learn from initial usage
3. Design the Voice User Experience (VUX)
4. Build Conversational Flows
Remember that mobile apps were different from web
apps and desktop apps.
Voice apps depend on a lot of AI and therefore will
feel different after building.
Build Conversational Flows
Iterate cross-functionally with VUX and Biz Logic
(Voice apps need different muscles)

6. Designing Conversational Flow

7. Building Great Voice User Experiences
Evolution of Voice
User Experience
Key Concepts
Command Response
Context
Aware
Mixed
Initiative
Event
Based
State
Tracking
Conversation
Flow

8. Building Great Voice User Experiences
Evolution of Voice
User Experience
Key Concepts
Command Response
Context
Aware
Mixed
Initiative
Event
Based
State
Tracking
Conversation
Flow

9. Building Great Voice User Experiences
Evolution of Voice
User Experience
Key Concepts
Command Response
Context
Aware
Mixed
Initiative
Event
Based
State
Tracking
Conversation
Flow

10. Working with Conversational Flow
1. Start with sample conversations
2. Focus on beginners and draw the
conversational flow for your app
3. Annotate to support advanced/repeat
users
Conversation Flow Examples:
https://medium.com/voice-games/recipe-for-a-great-voicefirst-
interactive-story-e71b9ee0666c
https://designguidelines.withgoogle.com/conversation/conversati
on-design-process/write-sample-dialogs.html#write-sample-
dialogs-high-level-flows-for-beginners

11. Implementing Voice Apps

12. From Conversation Flow to a Voice Script
Designed a Conversation Flow Language
 To ease collaboration between VUX, Developers, etc
 Inspired by HTML (& the lessons from there)
Two High Level Conversation Flow Elements
 Menus -> Decisions
 Forms -> Dialogs
Extended Support for Lower-Level Patterns
(ref: Violet)

13. Menus and Users decisions
Basic building block of most voice apps.
Potentially nested to support decisions that the user would need to make.

14. Getting multiple parameters from a user (dialog)
Aka Voice Forms
When we need to collect more than one input from the user

15. Lower Level Voice Design Patterns
1. Alternate Inputs
“Add the numbers 5 and 3”, “5 plus 3”
2. Alternate Responses
“The next meeting is in 5 minutes”, “You have a meeting coming up after 5 minutes”
3. Responses based on Experience Level
“Would you like restaurants that are close by, rated most highly, or by cuisine type”
“What types of restaurants would you like?”
4. Prompts vs Asks
Ask: Present Question and Wait for a Response
Prompt: Present upto 3 Questions and wait for a Response

16. A Conversation Example: Calculator
http://helloviolet.ai/docs/conversation-example

17. We want to see what you build…
Try out Violet:
1. Build your own voice use case.
2. Let us know if there are any Voice Design
Patterns that you would like to see it
implement.
Let us know how it goes
For more info:
http://HelloViolet.ai
https://github.com/salesforce/violet-conversations

18. What’s Next