Voice
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Web to Mobile and Now Voice Apps
Smart speakers are here, and they are not only changing how we interact with technology, but also how we get things done. As everyday users increasingly rely on them and businesses ramp up to use them, Voice Apps are now the new frontier for app design. Have you wondered what it would take to design an app that runs on them?
People use now using their voice and smart speakers for just about everything - from listening to music, catching up on the news, checking the weather, and setting daily reminders. By 2021, forecasts show that the use of smart speakers will top tablets.
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Getting Inputs for your Voice App
You have built a Voice App and it works well. You needed to use voice to expose data that you already had. It took a few iterations, but now users are happy with it. Your next challenge is needing to having your Voice App get data from the user.
If you are using the Violet framework then collecting data from users should not be hard. If you need an intro to Violet, see the article on Building a Voice App in 30 minutes. We will build on top of that article here.
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Building a Voice App in 30 minutes
You have mastered building web apps. Maybe even building mobile apps. But what about these smart speakers that are now sitting in people’s living rooms? What about our new found ability to talk to apps on our phones?
Did you find yourself wrestling with native APIs and small platform-specific details when you tried building a skill for Alexa or an action for Google Assistant? This doesn’t have to be the case. Building of Voice App can be simple and we can do it in 30 minutes.
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One year of learning from others about their experiences
The last year has been a fun ride. Since we open-sourced and started talking about the ideas behind Violet we have been able to learn lessons from the experiences of how some of the best Voice Apps have been built.
Not only have we built these into Violet, but we have also been talking about them at different places.
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A Voice Application Framework: Announcing Violet
For the greater part of this last year, I have had the pleasure of building a lot of Voice prototypes. These have included Alexa skills, actions for Google Home, as well as building standalone devices (powered by AVS) with custom wake-words and voices.
When building such Voice Apps/Skills, I quickly noticed the need for programming with a fairly powerful yet low-level platform-specific API’s. It reminded me of the first Web apps that I built, where we needed to program to the different DOM API of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.