In this, the second post from our three part series on principles of voice design, I'll be discussing the principle encapsulated by the dictum "be contextual". In other words, a well-designed voice application should, as much as possible, individualize the entire interaction.…
A recent survey by Wakefield Research found that more than half (51%) of adults worldwide report getting less sleep than they need on an average night and that 80% are using weekends to make up for lost sleep. If you are trying to repay your sleep debt, your voice assistant…
The first major principle of voice design is to be adaptable. You can't constrain users into responding with words and phrases that you expect, you need to let users speak in their own words.…
Word Mine by Sensible Object has won the GRAND PRIZE in the Alexa Skills Challenge!!!…
Pulse Labs has published a report on the state of Alexa education skills for kids. The report provides an overview of the landscape for these skills, and then does a deep dive into usability testing results for five skills.…
Pulse Labs had the opportunity and the honor of attending re:Invent this year and co-presenting a talk with Alexa evangelist Paul Cutsinger on "Alexa Skill Developer Tools: Build Better Skills Faster"…
What should your voice application do when it receives an unexpected user input?…
The Pulse Labs cofounders Abhishek Suthan and Dylan Zwick were guests on the VUX World podcast, and their interview is now available! You can check it out here - https://vux.world/vui-design-best-practice/…
Do you have an accent, or do other people? Dealing with all these variations appropriately is one of the hard problems faced by all voice platforms.…
Baseball and summer are a 150-year-old tradition, and still going strong. The Seventh Inning Stretch skill from Terren Peterson, an Alexa Champion, celebrates that history by inviting you to play ball. Last year, Peterson published a useful and prescient article about the difficulty of testing voice applications. So this year,…