After months of staying home and not seeing another human being for days on end, it got kind of lonely for me. So with the help of a conversational experience software partner, I built something to keep me sane under the guise of my agency’s first foray into the world of voice activated technology. Well, that’s not exactly what happened.
The real story begins when Doug Grumet and Michael Mish asked me to lead a task force to structure our voice marketing offering. I had to think about it for a bit. Sure, my team was well-versed in optimizing web pages for voiced search results from Google Assistant, but there was another side to voice marketing that we had the opportunity to dive deeper into. Our dev team in Boston had experience building voice applications for clients. You might know them better by their brand names like Alexa Skill or Google Action. These apps are capable of doing a lot of things beyond answering queries and should be thought of as web entities that you can have a conversation with.
Based on the work that team was doing, it made sense to have Jon Bishop, Director of Creative Technology, join the team. He is passionate about technology of all kinds and has a strong sense of how these apps can connect to a client’s existing consumer platforms. He even wrote a blog post about Intelligent Personal Assistants way back in late 2016. Once he and I kicked things off, we started investigating different solutions available to the marketplace. One of the vendors we found had an office right down the street from us – Voicify. They have a platform that allows brands to rapidly deploy voice experiences across any voice assistant device and easily maintain the content. So, we set up a meeting and got a few demos going.
We learned pretty quickly that their platform was going to allow us to create voice apps quickly for our clients with the benefit of being able to publish an app to multiple platforms from one interface. The Voicify Conversation Content Management System™ is an out-of the-box solution that allows brands to create Q&A content and deploy it onto voice-enabled devices with a few clicks. They have done a lot of the development already so that all you need to do is focus on the best content for your voice app. In order to really get to know the capabilities of the platform, we decided to create a voice app for our own agency. To make sure it wasn’t just the brainchild of two dudes, we enlisted the talents of a few other AMP experts:
- Sean Adams – who is an SEO Supervisor on my team and helped build out our Q&A structure
- Rachel MacMunn – who is a copywriter on our Creative team who made sure our content was aligned with AMP’s brand voice
- Nick Russo – who is on our AMP Marketing team who ensured our agency knowledge was correct
With the team assembled, we went to work on what kind of information we would want on the app and how the responses to users’ questions should be structured. Once we had the content set, we were able to bulk upload the inputs and responses into the Voicify platform. After a few rounds of beta testing (within Voicify and on Google), we were ready for deployment.
AMP Agency’s voice application is our proof of concept of developing a presence for our brand on the emerging platforms for conversational experiences. We’re excited to continue to add to our app over time and play around with a machine learning interface. The Voicify platform has more features that we have the ability to add to our app, such as:
- Text display, images, and video files for screen devices
- Sonic branding (playing a brand’s jingle as a part of a welcome message)
- Audio files, which includes changing the voice of our app to one of our employees like Rachel’s
- Connections to your ecommerce backend for voice initiated sales
These capabilities are all at our disposal and can be used for any brand that wants to partner with AMP to create their own voice app. With our experience, we can shorten the timeline from kickoff to launch.
So have a chat with us! If you have an Alexa speaker, try saying “Alexa, launch AMP Agency.”
With Google Assistant, say “Hey Google, let me talk to AMP Agency.” Then, go ahead and ask us any questions you may have about AMP.
Want to learn more? Check out what our Mobile App Design Agency can do for your brand.
