The Elements of Voice First Style

Appendix B. Demonstrating Voice First

If you have ever given demos of voicebots, you know how stressful the experience can be. You have put on your best Sunday suit and done all the right things: behaved impeccably, given a great PowerPoint presentation, demonstrated full and sensitive understanding of your prospect’s problems, definitely impressed your prospect with your client list and the reference quotes, and more. But all that, you fear—as you get ready to give your voicebot demo—could be wiped out (or so it feels when it happens) with a cruel, “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that!”

When you are demoing, remember that your goal is not to show off technology but rather to show off your company’s all-around competence: your competence as a businessperson and as someone who knows the product they are selling, and the competence of the team that put together the product—in this case, the voicebot.

Needless to say, your demo is as good as the VUI design behind it—and a solid design is your starting point. The key thing is this: the voicebot being demoed was designed for a use case that is not the same as the use case of the one who is demoing it—that is, the user for whom the voicebot was built is not looking to demo the competence of the company that built and sold it, but to solve their problem. This is an important point to keep in mind simply because a highly usable voicebot for an end user may not demo very well.

Remove All Prompts That Explicitly Talk About Failure

When ...