Detective X Alexa Skill with Clint McLean of Budgie

Voice in Canada Podcast

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In this episode, Teri welcomes Clint McLean, the founder and VUI designer of Budgie, a Toronto-based startup voice app design studio.

Welcome, Clint!

Budgie develops and markets Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant voice apps. They have five skills/actions that are currently published with more in development. Clint leverages a variety of experiences from both his creative and business background to create high production value voice and multimodal experiences. Their most famous skill at Budgie so far is Detective X, a high-production choose-your-own-adventure-style game built into a Hollywood narrative, and Clint will talk all about it and so much more.

Journeying into Voice Technology

When Alexa became available in Canada, he was in a place where he felt burnt out on most of his creative outlets, and so he got his first smart speaker immediately they were available and starting experimenting with voice apps.
He realized the potential that it had and found it very exciting, but he didn’t know how to code, so he kept a notepad of voice tech ideas, and then started consuming every content he could get on voice technology.
In 2019, the Alexa in Canada podcast featured Braden Ream from Voiceflow who explained that Voiceflow was a no-code alternative for building Alexa skills.
Clint immediately signed up for Voiceflow and that’s how he was able to start creating voice apps.
He started working on basic voice games and apps, and he initially made a game to learn about APIs, a sing song game to learn about capturing utterances, and an Easter egg like skill to help people learn about integrating audio files.
He later on started taking on more ambitious projects.

Detective X

It’s a high-production choose-your-own-adventure-style game built into a Hollywood narrative, and it’s all about detectives trying to stop a killer.
With his background in audio production and storytelling, making interactive fiction seemed like a good fit for both his strengths and he was genuinely excited about it.
He worked with voice actors and employed sound effects and sound tracks to create an immersive experience that was unlike anything else in the market.
He tried watching a movie with his eyes closed and imagined what it would take to have such great audio in a movie that anyone listening to it without watching would understand and enjoy the plot. That’s the mindset he had when he started working on Detective X.

Creating Detective X

He started with a basic storyline, the same way movie scripts are written. From there he started using the poly voices within Voiceflow to start constructing the dialogue and make up each scene.
He voiced one of the characters himself and hired voice actors on Fiverr to voice the rest of the characters.
He included a game saving functionality since not everyone has the time or patience to play the game straight through.
Detective X was launched in all English speaking regions and is also available on Google Assistant.
The game officially launched at the end of May on both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, and it just so happened that the Amazon Alexa team was hosting a gaming week on their Twitch channel at the same time, so Clint got them to play Detective X and the game got a lot of positive feedback.

In-Skill Purchases

He has given a lot of thought to it and has even tried it out on some prototype versions, but he concluded that Detective X could easily be turned episodic with different cases, different mysteries to solve, and different killers. That would be a successful approach, and so in the long term he wants the initial case of the game to be free with future cases being in an ISP pay wall.

The Future

He’s interested in collaborating with other developers and stakeholders in the voice technology industry while also continuing to work on his own projects.
He also plans on expanding on the Detective X universe and experiment more on visuals and APL with the Echo Show.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

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