Flash briefing 25 – Challenges in building voice apps

The first challenge present is always gonna be bound by the platforms where you are building your app. For Amazon Alexa, one of the most discussed limits is the 90 seconds audio before prompting the user for a choice to be made. This kind of restrictions, will affect the design of your application and are challenges that might boost your creativity if used correctly. Constraints are fundamental in design. Know the ones each platform has upfront.

The second challenge when building voice apps is identifying yourself with your user. It might seem intuitive but remember that even when we designed personas for graphical interfaces, we can provide visual cues and restrict the user to our lists and our buttons. With voice is fundamental to connect with the user, as you will be effectively having a short-logical conversation with them.

The third challenge is establishing trust and discoverability. Despite both Amazon Alexa and Google teams user engagement and discovery of features is really low. Until users get on board in the platforms we won’t see this solved and until then brands and developers are figuring out on the way.

You might be thinking Mari, the biggest challenge smart speakers and assistant adoption have is privacy and security and you haven’t mention it. But John, that’s the biggest challenge that the field has as a whole right now. And I think users will care less about their privacy if the service is convenient enough. We need to figure out privacy as a field, not only for voice assistants. Other challenges include user authentication and this one for me I guess means more voice based authentication, cause otherwise you could send a token to user phone and authenticate them through their phone.

Thanks for listening. Before wrapping up this episode, I want to remind you that this a short show providing bits in the voice ecosystem. To access exclusive content and commentaries, please join our growing mailing list to get the ultimate weekly newsletter on voice apps. Go to voicefirstweekly.com and sign up there. And if you want to support this show, rate us on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you found this episode. Have a nice day, will talk tomorrow.

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The ultimate resource in the voice space. Conversational interfaces, voice interfaces, smart speakers and smart assistants, voice strategy, audio branding.

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