The Elements of Voice First Style

Appendix A. The 10 Sources of Voice First Failures!

The doom of a voicebot project can often be predicted before any work is done; just examine the team that is tasked to deliver the voicebot and the processes this team will be using. Here are 10 such indicators that should set off your alarms if you find yourself working on deploying a voicebot:

• Not treating the voicebot as a product and not assigning a product manager to lead it from beginning to end. A voicebot that has no owner who will be celebrated if it succeeds or blamed if it fails is a voicebot that will fail.

• Designing from the armchair, without discovery, without identifying the actual target user, without identifying the business buyer, without gathering the key people involved in establishing the business purpose and fleshing out the requirements.

• Treating the voicebot deployment as if it were an IT project and handing ownership of it to the engineering team.

• Grossly under financing the voicebot project, while spending an order of magnitude or two more on the mobile app, the website, social media, and videos.

• Not hiring VUI professionals. Yes, we are all experts in carrying conversations. But that does not mean we can design voice first experiences between a human being and a voicebot. We don’t pretend to be writers just because we can write, or that we can hop into a race car just because we have been driving cars for decades. Why do we think we can design a voicebot just because we can converse? A corollary ...