A Carnival of Creativity: Voice Workshop @ iAB Nonference

This week the Rabbit & Pork team had the pleasure of running a voice app workshop at the brilliant iAB Nonference.

What is the Nonference? Well it’s a conference which is a little more interactive. Rather than taking notes, attendees are asked to take part.

Located at Tobacco Dock in Wapping,  the event consists of 7 different rooms with a total of 40 sessions. Our session, A Carnival of Creativity, took place in room 6.

We apologise to all those who queued up and couldn’t get in and hope you’ll be able to attend another of our sessions in the future – check out our list of upcoming voice events to see where we’ll be speaking in the future.

Our session was a 40 minute whistle stop tour of how to create and promote a voice app.

There were several creative elements to the session:

1. Each team had to pick a brand to create voice app ideas for, to select a brand one team member had to play hook-a-duck with brand-names written on the underside of each duck.
2. Using the selected brand the team then thought up five voice app ideas.
3. Each team then split in half, one half created an example conversation between a user and Alexa / Google and the other team worked on creating a brand persona.
4. Staying split in half the next step was to complete their conversation design adding in elements from the brand persona and practice their conversation for presenting later. While the other team had to add sonic branding and/or scoring into their voice app using the kids music instruments, sound effect machines, or their phone.
5. The teams then joined together and, with a £200,000 budget, planned how they would promote their voice apps. In lieu of money teams were given marbles, with each marble worth £10,000.  Marbles were placed in labelled pots so we could track how much was being spent for our research.

Team 1 –  Glastonbury festival

The Glastonbury teams idea was a food click and collect voice app that allowed festival goers to reserve food and drinks at stages to save on queuing.

Rabbit & Pork notes

• We also liked the reminders for tickets and registration idea
• Persona was on point, Freddie from Shoreditch a Uni dropout!
• Conversation was a little long but followed all the steps required for an order
• Great idea to use the integration with maps / location and payments via voice
• There was great upsell in the process to add drinks, convert to a meal deal
• Not sure on the sound scoring at the end of the conversation, but it brought laughter which can help with recall of your voice app

Team 2 – HelloFresh

Team HelloFresh had a good set of ideas and went for the use case of cooking instructions

Rabbit & Pork notes

• Nice idea to get Alexa to set the timer for you
• Using custom audio (the xylophone) to let the user know the timer is set and then when the timer us up
• Nice exit audio to bookmark the experience.
• Some elements of the flow could do with work to help the user move from one step to the next at their own pace

Team 3 – A‌i‌r‌b‌n‌b‌

The last team to go was the A‌i‌r‌b‌n‌b‌ team, with their “Weekend Decided” idea

Rabbit & Pork notes

• We liked the idea of the Argument Stopper to stop those arguments on your holidays
• The persona of Lily for Airbnb was also great
• Excellent use of location data to work out travel time in the conversation
• Good use of explicit confirmation in the following conversation:  User – “Can you book it for Saturday?” ,  Alexa – “on Saturday there are 3…”
• Loved the Airbnb sonic branding at the end, the team should copyright it!

The winners?

All the teams were great but the winners were team Glastonbury. Their use of location and payments via voice would create a frictionless way to be able to pay for food and skip those queues so you didn’t miss any of the bands playing!

At the same time each of the teams also decided on where they would spend their £200,000 budget to promote their voice app. In order of channel popularity, the teams decide to spend:

1. Paid social – £160k
2. Audio adverts – £130k
3. Email  – £70k
4. Display – £60k
5. Product sticker – £50k
6. = Alexa App / Google home app directory reviews – £50k
7. Website – £40k
8. Organic social  – £20k
9. Influences – £10k
10. = PR- £10k
11. TV- £0k
12. Print – £0k
13. OOH – £0k

So not many people pushing TV or OOH!

Thanks to all those who participated in the event and the iAB for inviting us. We hope to be back again with a new session next year!

If you’re interested in building a voice app or skill then please get in touch.

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