All about Voysis and the GUI to VUI transition with Brian Colcord

VUX World

We’ve covered plenty of voice first designand developmenton this podcast. Well, that’s what the podcast is, so we’re bound to! Most of what we’ve discussed has largely been voice assistant or smart speaker-focused. We haven’t covered a huge amount of voice first application in the browser and on mobile, until now.

Mic check

You’ll have noticed the little mic symbol popping up on a number of websites lately. It’s in the Google search bar, it’s on websites such as EchoSim and Spotify are trialing it too. When you press that mic symbol, it enables your mic on whatever device you’re using and lets you speak your search term.

Next time you see that mic, you could be looking at the entry point to Voysis.

On a lot of websites, that search may well just use the website’s standard search tool to perform the search. With

Voysis, its engine will perform the search for you using its voice tech stack.

That means that you can perform more elaborate searches that most search engines would struggle with. For example:

“Show me Nike Air Max trainers, size 8, in black, under $150”

Most search engines would freak out at this, but not Voysis. That’s what it does.

Of course, it’s more than an ecommerce search tool, as we’ll find out during this episode.

In this episode

We discuss how approaches to new technology seem to wrongly follow a reincarnation route. Turning print into web by using the same principles that govern print. Turning online into mobile by using the same principles that govern the web. Then taking the practices and principles of GUI and transferring that to VUI. We touch on why moving you app to voice is the wrong approach.

We also discuss:

• Voysis - what it is and what it does
• Getting sophisticated with searches
• Designing purely for voice vs multi modal
• The challenge of ecommerce with a zero UI
• The nuance between the GUI assistant and voice only assistants
• How multi modal voice experiences can help the shopping experience
• Making the transition from GUI to VUI
• The similarities between moving from web to mobile and from mobile to voice - (when moving to mobile, you had to think about gestures and smaller screens)
• Error states and points of delight
• The difference between designing for voice and designing for a screen
• Testing for voice
• Understand voice first ergonomics

Our Guest

Brian Colcord, VP of Design at Voysis, is a world-leading designer, cool, calm and collected speaker and passionate sneaker head.

After designing the early versions of the JoinMe brand markings and UI, he was recruited by LogMeIn and went on to be one of the first designers to work on the Apple Watch prior to its release.

Brian has made the transition from GUI to VUI design and shares with us his passion for voice, how he made the transition, what he learned and how you can do it too.

About Voysis

Voysis is a Dublin-based voice technology company that believes voice interactions can be as natural as human ones and are working intently to give brands the capability to have natural language interactions with customers.

Links

Check out the Voysis website

Follow Voysis on Twitter

Read the Voysis blog

Join Brian on LinkedIn

Follow Brian on Twitter

Listen to the AI in industry podcast with Voysis CEO, Peter Cahill

Read Brian's post, You're already a voice designer, you just don't know it yet

Where to listen

• iTunes/Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• TuneIn
• iHeartRadio
• Pippa
• Any other podcast player you use or ask Any Pod to play V.U.X. World on Alexa

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