Launching ‘The Big Conversation’ on the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa

Client

Refinitiv provides financial software and risk solutions – delivering news, information and analytics, enabling transactions, and connecting the global community

Challenge

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Refinitiv had already been producing a weekly video series called “The Big Conversation” where they would examine major themes driving the markets and use Refinitiv’s best-in-class data to assess the risks and opportunities for investors. Due to the massive financial impact of COVID-19, a sub-series called the “Corona Correction” was produced.

At the same time with many people now working from home and spending more time with their smart speakers, we wanted to repurpose the content into a format friendly for Alexa and the Google Assistant.

Solution

We wanted to be able to bring the great content that had already been produced onto smart speakers. To do this we created a flash briefing skill on Alexa and a news briefing on the Google Assistant.

On Alexa devices, users would be able to ask Alexa for the latest news and then listen to the latest episode of The Big Conversation.

While on Google, users would also be able to ask for their news to hear The Big Conversation or just say, “Hey Google, business news”. This unbranded invocation allowed us to gain new listeners who may have not heard of Refinitiv before.

To make the process of uploading new episodes quicker and easier, we created a custom web app to upload each episode. The app then creates the required feeds to submit new episodes to both Google and Alexa in one process.

Results