I was going over Cathy Pearl post on Sample Dialogs: The Key to Creating Great Actions on Google and one part of the post, really caught my attention:

With a conversational interface, the content itself is part of the structure, so design becomes even more important.

The post main goal is to highlight why sample dialogs are necessary and the pitfalls to avoid when creating them. As you can see or if you are listening, hear, this is aligned with what we talked yesterday about creative vs technology. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a software engineer by trade, I love technology, I want to jump into writing code as much as the next guy or gal, however, when I advocate for creatives first for voice applications, what I mean is what Cathy put into words better: the content is the structure. The conversation is the voice app.

For platform companies, like Amazon and Google who are building the tools technology comes first, they need the natural language processing experts, deep learning, et all, but for those like us building on top of this platforms, technology comes second.

I wonder what’s your design process, how you go from idea to voice skill? What’s your take on this technology vs creative thing I have gotten myself into? Comment on Twitter directed to @voicefirstlabs or Instagram @voicefirstweekly.

My name is Mari, you have a great day and we’ll talk tomorrow!