We’re honoured to be joined by Paul Jackson, Senior Designer at the BBC, to discuss how the Beeb are approaching VUI design, with a particular focus on designing Alexa Skills for kids.
Full transcript further down
Where to listen
VUI design for kids
The BBC is killing it in voice right now. It’s one of the only companies with a full in-house voice and AI team and it consists of tens of people. It’s investing heavily on what it believes is the future of content. This week, we’re lucky enough to step inside the BBC and see how it’s approaching voice design.
We speak to Senior Designer on the Voice and AI team, Paul Jackson, about his experience in creating the CBeebies Alexa Skill and how you can apply the learnings to your voice user experiences, regardless of whether you’re creating for kids or not.
We discuss:
- The make-up of the BBC’s Voice and AI team
- How the BBC are thinking about and approaching voice
- The challenges of Natural Language Understanding with kids
- User research findings from testing skills with kids
- Translating real-world insights into mimicked voice experiences
- Best practice for designing VUI experiences for kids
- Some of the BBC’s 12 principles of designing for voice
- Limiting options and choice
- Balancing discovery and choice
- The use of sound, audio and recording with talent
- The implementation approach and skills within skills
- Release cycles and continuous improvement
The whole episode is littered with clips from the CBeebies Alexa Skill as we move through the conversation and highlight examples of design thinking and how it translates to the end-result.
This one is not to be missed.
Links
Follow the BBC UXD team on Twitter and Instagram
Follow Paul on Twitter and Instagram
Enable the CBeebies skill
Head to Mobile UX London
Enquire about the Designing for Voice Course (mention VUX World to save 10%)
Full transcript (unedited):
Kane: Hello, ladies and gentlemen boys and girls welcome to vux world the Practical voice podcast. This episode of VUX world is brought to you by Europe’s Most forward-thinking ux and design conference mobile ux London. We spoke about this before on the podcast is the fourth annual conference that they’re putting on its covering all kinds of areas and voice is a huge part of that.
I’m going to be hosting the event and I cannot wait for that. Our guest today Paul Jackson is going to be speaking to you from the BBC. He’s going to be speaking there as well about all the things that he’s being learning while designing for the BBC not all of its going to be in this podcast. So you’ll need to go to mobile ux London to hear the rest of it.
Also, we’re talking about verse things there on virtual reality augmented reality connected cars and homes mobile gamification. And as I said, voice as well, you can get your ticket right now at mobile ux London.com and you can save 20% if you use the promo code vux world this podcast is also brought to you by it’s more value X London again, but this is they’re designing for voice course.
It’s a course. It’s in London. It’s a six week course and you will learn all kinds of things around mastering conversation design prototyping and testing voice. Experiences we’re looking at Advanced topics in the UI design and very design evaluated and use cases deliverables for certification the general overview of development for Alexis kills the people delivering this course, it’s in partnership with Aviva and we have people, you know senior ux designers and leave developers from Aviva the insurance company and they’re going to be doing the course and delivering the course.
It is absolutely immense head to Mobile ux London.com. Right now because there’s a new cost and in January and you can sign up right now, you will not regret it careers are change in design is change in voice is the future of design for many many Brands and companies. We’re going to be speaking to the BBC today and just how seriously they’re taking this is unbelievable.
So now really is the time to start thinking about if you’re interested in voice and you want to make it a career 2019 will be the time when you can do that and you can get off to a flying start in January. With this design and for voice course, and if you mentioned video x world when you sign up, you’ll save 10% more value, excellent and thank you so much to the team of more value X London for presenting.
This week’s podcast the BBC today. We’re joined by the BBC the British broadcast Corporation and we’re going to be talking all about how they’re approaching this whole voice thing and some of the methodologies have been using some of the research. They’ve been using a more specifically how to design voice experiences for people who can’t even talk yet for kids.
We’re going to be talking about design and. Experiences for kids we’re joined by senior designer Paul Jackson and he’s been working intently over the summer on the CBeebies Alexis kill. We’re going to be talking to Paul all about all the design decisions that were made and all about the process of how it was designed some of the research that has been done and what they’ve learned.
I’m going to be talking a little bit as well about the BBC and their approach to voice in the team structures and some of the other projects that they’ve got going on. This is a really really deep dive into designing for kids and also giving you a bit of an. Site into how the BBC are approaching this space.
It’s a fantastic podcast. You’re going to absolutely love it. Me and Dustin had an absolute will of the time Paul is immensely fantastic. You’re going to love it without further Ado. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Paul Jackson of the BBC on vux world.
So ladies and gentlemen, Paul Jackson of the BBC Paul welcome.
Paul: Thanks. Yeah. Cheers. Thanks for having me. Not a problem. Thank you for joining us been pursuing the BBC for quite a while.
Kane: Now. I’ve been speaking speaking with a few people and we just haven’t managed to make the stars align, but we have done today. So I really really appreciate you joining us.
Paul: Thanks very much. Yeah, no problem. You’re very welcome.
Kane: Dustin What’s the de France have a baby C equivalent or even the USA Today other BBC equivalent.
Dustin:Â I would say in the US the equivalent as in PR, if you think of it in terms of sort of national media PBS sighting is also perhaps a good analogy.
But if we’re lifting him out voice specifically NPR’s is doing great things much like BBC as.
Kane:Â Yeah, what about France France?
Dustin:Â There’s a there’s a handful. I don’t consume as much friendship media, but they’re certainly national television stations and National radio as well.
Kane:Â Nice. So Paul tell everybody a little bit about what you looked at.
The BBC the BBC has been just grabbing hold of this whole voice thing by the Scruff of the neck hasn’t it over the last kind of few months. I’ve Heard lots and lots of interesting stuff coming out in the. You see I’ve experienced lots of interesting stuff on the AL device over here, which I put on you in case you kicks off.
So tell us a little bit about what you’re doing and little bit about what the BBC been up to.
Paul:Â Yeah, absolutely. So I am a designer on The Voice and AI team that’s the official name of our team in the BBC. And yeah, we’re we’ve got quite a serious commitment to voice. We see it as a really great new frontier and we want to be.
We want to be on the front foot with it. Really. So we’ve been doing loads of things. I think that the first thing we released was the inspection chamber that came out of DC R&D and from then voisin AI team was formed. We released a BBC scale which allows you to listen to the radio and listen to podcasts and in September we release the BBC kids skill, which is something that I’ve worked on.
That was my that was my baby. So to speak and we’ve got lots more in the pipeline. Basically. Yeah, we’ve made a really serious commitment to to voice and to getting lots of our products onto smart speakers. Where kids and it’s not speakers solely that you’ve been focused on of you been looking at for example Google assistant on mobiles and so right now is it purely Smiles because I’m a minute it’s voice and AI in any terms really we want to find that, you know, we want to find the best way to get BBC products onto onto voice conversational you are at you know, The next generation of devices really?
So yeah, we’ve got got to skills out the moment on on Alexa and we are looking to looking to bring stuff out on Google as well and you know, lots of other devices beyond that as we just try and learn as much as we can about this space. And parcel.
Dustin: What about you? Were you already invoice? And you came to the BBC to work on this but um BBC got into voice? How did you get into this field?
Paul:Â So I was already at the BBC. I used to work in interactive TV. I did that for two years and then a role came up as a senior designer applied for that and part of the interview process the BBC involves completing a task and part of that task. Is about picking a medium and they give you three examples.
You can pick something that is for the web something that’s for mobile or something. That’s a TV and I thought of was a bit cheeky and I knew there was a voice team being formed so I sort of made my task a little bit about voice. Also built a small scale and demonstrated that back and then when I got the role, I got put in The Voice team which is sort of exactly what I hoped would happen.
So yeah, it’s been very very fortunate to have sort of been picked because I know a lot of people are really Keen to to join our team. So I’m yeah to do myself very lucky.
Kane:Â Nice and you’re going to be speaking at mobile ux London which I’ll be hosting.
Paul: Yeah. Yeah. I’m I’m speaking about beep see kids skill. My talk is called deceptively simple designing a voice experience for preschoolers and it’s all based around question. How do you design a voice experience for an audience that still learning to speak? I’m going to explain why why anybody should care about designing voice experience with children how we approached it and what we’ve learned about it.
Kane:Â Wow, that’s how to design a voice experience for people who are just learning to speak sounds fairly complex.
Paul: Yeah. It really has been. Yeah, we’ve it’s been we’ve been working on it since March that’s when I joined the team. And I’ve learned so much about voice but also learned so much about children and and it’s been really really useful as ux designer to to be working on a product that’s aimed at children because most of the time when you’re designing a product you naturally assumed.
Will you make assumptions based on the fact that you you might be the audience, you know, you try and not be the user but every now and then something slips in and you end up doing you know end up making a decision that sort of based on your own experiences. Whereas when you design it for children, you know from the get-go that they that you are not a child and so you’re still the approach that you take to it is.
It’s also designing for aliens, you know, you’re a lot more rigorous in your research, you know, and and yeah, it’s been it’s been an amazing experience last six months. And yeah, I’m really proud of this girl with put out. Have you been with you played with it before?
Kane: I’ve got to go I had to go this week. The CBeebies one. That’s the one yes.
Paul:Â Yes.
Kane:Â I’ve got to play around that don’t know if I don’t know whether if you kind of obviously won’t be available in France as it does in the kind of margin.
Dustin:Â Mine is actually set to the US. Do you keep it just to the UK or is it pretty worldwide across English or cows?
Paul:Â It’s just the UK and I mean I’m afraid.
Kane: Okay. Well what I’ll do as we go through this I’ll take a few Clips out and I will kind of once the podcast comes out the clips of you. Usually I do it. As we can to talk but today has been a bit manic. So I’ve not chance to grab the audio yet. But but yeah, well, we’ll put some of those stuff in so it’s in it’s interesting and we’ll we’ll get onto speaking about that skill and about some of the things that you’ve learned while you’ve been doing that in kind of a moment, but I wanted to start back up just a little bit you mentioned that you’re part of The Voice Team at the BBC. So you presumably this is a whole full time thing. And you said that they’ve got to skills. So how does it work with the team than is it wanting working across all of the areas is the team split up to wanting work on one skill wanting we’re going another skill. How does it all kind of work in terms of the team structure? And who does what?
Paul:Â Okay. Yeah. So the voice mail items that are split into four areas. We’ve got you acts which I’m part of as a designer. There’s an editorial side to it. The product side to it and there’s also obviously an engineering side to it and I can talk about the ux team a little bit. I’m I’m part of that and there’s 12 of us at the moment and we’re comprised of designers Nation Architects and writers.
I’m will get split across different BBC products as part of multidisciplinary squad. So each one of those squads is made up of some Engineers some products and project management some editorial and some design and we split across three locations London Sultan Glasgow. I really that’s just the sort of the voice side of it at the moment.
We also have a the AI side which I can’t go into much detail for a couple of reasons one, too. Nda’s confidentiality excetera to don’t you know that much about it. It’s all fairly push Hutch, you know, so so that’s how we sort of split up and and the way we work is we sort of blend. You know the experience side of it the design side she works with the content side, which would be editorial and then we bring in product expertise as well from the product teams at the BBC.
So I worked with a designer called Hazel Wiley who is a ux designer in children’s on this so she’s not voice designer first and foremost, but she has lots of expertise of around BBC’s children’s offering and so. What really closely with her and because voices horizontal? That’s that’s the way we think that all the teams are going to work.
But but at the moment as with as I’m sure everyone’s in this boat, that’s all subject to change. We’re still trying to figure this out. We’re trying to apply. Perhaps the way we would have worked on mobile or on websites previously to this but we’re you know, we’re still figuring it all out. So that’s certainly how we’ve done the BBC kids skill but as we move on to other products that might change depending on how those products work and the expertise they have their but that’s certainly the approach we’ve taken so far.
Kane: Hmm, you’re talking there about about the BBC are also trying to figure this out and I seen recently that on the sort of the BBC of put out a request for information for everyone listening who who kind of is in the product kind of Market as such those of you that build these kind of conversational user interface Solutions voice Solutions and all that kind of stuff. There’s a request for information out at the moment from the BBC all around voice and. National user interfaces and essentially I don’t know whether or not you know too much about this part of whether you’re involved in this or not. But essentially the BBC a kind of looking to reach out to establish companies and startups to try and help kind of figure out those things around their work floors and around how to you know, how to kind of maybes consolidate some of the technology or have used to using so if there’s anyone out there who builds who was on the software side. It was creating some of this software. I’m thinking of, you know, the Jovo’s and the pull strings out there. It’s essentially it’s not contract. It’s not that doesn’t doesn’t look like anything that you’ll get paid for necessarily but it’s just to help the BBC kind of figure out a little bit more about this. I don’t know whether or not you kind of either know about that Paul or were involved in any of that or not.
Paul:Â I know a little bit about it. I’m not involved in it, you know specifically but yeah, that’s definitely out there would encourage anyone to get in touch because at the BBC is really uniquely placed in this space, too.
To offer something that none of the none of the sort of the big boys can offer because we’re you know entirely license fee driven and we are and I mean we’re doing it for the good of the user really we’re not we’re not interested in voice for no other reason than to to provide a good experience for people.
Dustin: One of the things that stood out to me of that RFI that you just mentioned Kane was the request for information about automatic speech recognition ASR for kids and it comes it comes back to what you were mentioning Paul which was about how do you do research on and how do you design for people who are just learning how to speak? Can you talk a little bit more about what that research process look like.
Paul:Â And the research projects around we children. Yeah. So the reason that is in in that in that request is because we found that children are very good at speaking and smart speakers not very good at listening and when you put the two together, it’s really difficult like.
We we designed so many are paths and and we’ve had to think about our past more than almost anything else like the level of confidence. We get back from from what children say and what the device can understand is is quite low really what you know, almost 50% sometimes so I think that’s why that is in that in that request because that’s something that we’ve had to work around basically and the better smart speakers get listening the better the software is the easier it will be to design experiences for children.
Dustin:Â I’m sure that’s only compounded by the fact that children aren’t necessarily known for being the most patients when things don’t go their way.
Paul:Â Absolutely absolutely. So so one of the things we saw certainly around patients was if children aren’t understood the next time if you if you read prompt them the next time they try and answer they are not answering in a calm manner. They they get angry really quickly or they shout it so it gets distorted.
And we saw that a lot. So we’ve specifically designed her a pass to to make sure that children don’t get caught in Loops. That’s like one of our big principles is that you shouldn’t keep children having to repeat things like if they say something twice in our skill and they’re not understood we moved them on move them onto something. We don’t keep them, you know in that Loop, basically.
Dustin:Â What’s an example of something like that? Can you walk us through that?
Paul: Yes, so so in The Big C kids scale if you say you want to play a game. Would you like a game or a story you’ll be presented with two random characters? It could be mr. Tumble. It could be go chapters. It could be doggy from hey doggy, let’s listen and find out who’s head of play. Hello, it’s just in a wolf. Who do you want to play with? And then you get asked who do you want to play with? So that point the child can answer with one of the characters they’ve heard or any of the characters we’ve got so they say Dougie and they’re not understood will come back and say sorry. I didn’t quite catch that. Who would you like to play with? They say they took you again and they’re still not understood then we don’t we don’t prompt them for a third time. We would just say oops. I still don’t understand. Would you like to meet more friends or would you like a surprise? So when you’re for children is surprised, you know, nine out of ten will take that surprise and what that surprise is.
We just randomly pick a game for you, but because we called it a surprise. You know, we’re taking this bad situation where children are props on the verge of getting so frustrated that they’ll say say stop to the device and we will instead spring them into something exciting and what our research showed us was that a surprise to a child is it’s like a drug. Basically they absolutely love this price even if what they get at the end of the sort of surprise process is just a game that they played before. The notion of a surprise is exciting. We have a big drum roll in there if you’re surprised.
And kids absolutely love that and it really shifts the focus from I’m not being understood and I’m getting frustrated too. Suddenly. I’ve got this of special treat and. Although that seems like very, you know, some very specifically aimed at kids. I think there’s there’s definitely something that we could all learn from that when designing skills for anyone this idea of don’t keep people in Loops move them onto something.
You know, I think that’s definitely like a huge learning that we’ve taken away from this process. Was that something that you found you mentioned that you were doing kind of research and stuff. Is that something that you found in the research process? I was that something that you found through building something and then sort of testing it was it was that really a parent straight away or two drops to go away and build something and it kind of like test it and find out at that point.
That was something that we found out during our user testing. So we did loads of use testing throughout the six months that we’ve worked on this usings of Wizard of Oz style testing where we would set up the device as a Bluetooth speaker and then weeds of the trigger a load of sounds listening to the child and responding basically being the brain of this part speaker, and we found that really early on that children aren’t very good at speaking and although when in that process we can we can understand we knew that Alexa wouldn’t you know, we would take recordings from these sessions then we would play them to the device and see what the device thought. The child said. It was really clear that the early aren’t you the kids are going to have a hard time being understood here.
So so really designing for children is about designing for when things go wrong, which. Kind of seems appropriate if you’ve got kids if you know what children are like, you know expect things to go wrong, but you know one of our principles and when your cursor for example the the CBB skill, and as I said as we go through this we’ll put some audio in there.
Kane:Â So the example of the BBC’s The CBB skill. First of all, it is fantastic that the the sound design element of it is which would obviously expect from the BBC is absolutely spot-on, you know, you mentioned the drum rolls and there’s also there’s a game where you can play like high enough that it do you trying to find somebody on your calendar specifically who it is but little monster.
Paul:Â Yeah, a little monster.
Kane: Yeah, and when you give you guess and you get it wrong, there’s a really quirky little sound effect that players to let you know that you’ve got it wrong good guess but I think that sound might be something else so it’s really really good. But what I know is one of the observations I notice is that as much as possible from what kind of scene it’s a lot of it is around giving giving options rather than being open-ended. So for. Would you like a game or a story? Do you want to play? Do you want to listen to the story about the bear that wants to hug or do you want to hear the story about this and it’s kind of like rather than seeing, you know, tell us what you want to do and having a really open-ended. It’s more kind of like make a choice out of these options was that done on purpose based on that or is that just how it is?
Paul:Â Yeah, that’s a conscious decision that came from speaking to lots of parents about how they choose. I’m story so that kids and lots of parents said that they would never in a million years after their their child like the full bookshelf to choose from like they would give them two books and say do you want this one or this one?
My bookshelf is full of stories. I’m going to pick out to for you to choose from. And so we based the design on that really? Children can be really indecisive if you give them a big choice and we didn’t want navigation. It was really bulky and long. We didn’t want to read out 10 different stories that you could choose from.
So the design of the navigation really try to find a balance between navigation and Discovery. So if you go for Pure navigation, He basically let’s the sitemap and say what do you want which is a horrible voice experience. That’s like as of old phone system, you know voice voice approach. But if you just do like a small amount of options then are you sure that you know children are going to discover the breadth of our content and the discovery side is going to work.
So we sort of Hit Upon something that’s kind of in the middle of that where we give them two random prompts and then we ask them, you know, which one do they want, but that question is actually open because we also find that children aren’t afraid to ask for what they want. So when when the scale says to you, who do you want to play with?
You can name any of the characters that we support even if they’ve not announce themselves to you. So the same thing with the stories. So yeah, we will present you with two stories. But if you know specifically which story you want you can say that and we will will match that and we’ll give you that we’re not being explicit in saying it’s an open question because.
Because I Insight from parents that telling them it’s an open question, you know sort of in invites indecision and invites your son to stay up way past their bedtime instead of getting straight into her story and enjoying it and fallen asleep. So what you’re saying there then correct me if I’m wrong, but what you’re seeing there is essentially the skill that and forcing against purely on CBeebies the skill that is there has.
A lot more content than what’s actually offered and you just randomize the two prompts. Is that right? Yeah on the to probably different all the time and his mother sits behind it. Yeah, we give you a very narrow focus on quite a big content set now that probably won’t stay the same forever. We’re gonna hit a Tipping Point where this approach might not work anymore.
I don’t know when that’ll be I don’t know what the maximum number of stories and games is before offering to feels limiting but for the time being we think it works really well.
Dustin:Â And do you find that kids are going for a new one each time or they have their favorite and they want to do it over and over and over and over.
Paul:Â We all say a mix of both, which is exactly what we expected because that’s what some of the parents told us parents told us that their kids either wanted something new every night or that they wanted the same story every night for a month. So this is like two different types of child and ask that to telling us that all the games and all the stories of basically being enjoyed equally so so we’re really happy with how I navigations performing that’s interesting about kind of how how would you kind of manage to make Alexa?
Kane: so when we spoke to Heidi Culbertson what she was saying is essentially when she’s designing user experiences for older adults. The aim is to try and get them to do something that they naturally do everyday but using Alexa, so it’s you’re not trying to change too much. You’re not trying to kind of create this whole new habit. You just trying to get them to do one thing that they already do every day. And it seems as though from the research that you’ve been doing. It’s almost as if you’ve kind of created The Experience. That just slot so neatly into the at the typical story time, you know, so you taking cues from what’s actually happening in the real world and you’ve kind of replicated that within the voice experience just think that is one of the reasons why why these experiences are so good is because it is because you’ve essentially built them solely around that situation,
Paul: I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it’s sort of like ask amorphic approach really in the same way that you know, When iOS, you know the early days of iOS everything looked like it had a sort of a basis in physical reality it I think we’re kind of going through that with voice, but we’ll come out the other side and you know, when people are more voice literate maybe in the future we might be able to move away from that but it’s a it’s a great leg up in the early days of voice.
I think to to base it on, you know, existing user Behavior, which is obviously a. Is it master of ux wind being able to do that? But but yeah, we definitely been inspired by by what parents and what children have told us about about their behavior when he joined other forms of content. Yeah.
Kane: Hmm. I’m curious around how you kind of how you go about doing that kind of research. Obviously the BBC I suppose it’s Unique for the BBC because you know, you’ve got lots of resources. It’s a relatively well Resort company large reach. But still the the the concept and the idea of doing user research with kids and with parents is quite a challenging. I suppose that we welcome you probably correct me if I’m wrong, but I imagine they’re pretty hard group of people to get hold of and wondering whether you can talk us through a little bit about you said it took six months to do this girl wonder whether you can talk a little bit about that research report approach in terms of you know, how you know, was it simple enough to get hold of people and then if you did when you did how did the whole kind of research on for throughout the project so.
Paul:Â What I realize is that I when I outline the members of our ux team, I failed to mention that we also have a dedicated design researcher. Sorry about that Charlotte, but Charlotte’s been fantastic throughout this entire process. And so Charlotte slide our research and. The way we’ve done that research we’ve done lots of user testing.
So we tested with over 60 children over the six months. We’ve done seven user testing sessions and most of them have been in our lab, but we’ve done a couple in schools as well and recruiting recruiting children that have got experience of a smart speaker is quite difficult. You know, it’s not a big Market at the moment.
And obviously where they stop in Salford and so that sort of Narrows down, you know, the potential research subjects quite a lot, but we have managed to make it work. You just have to have quite a quite a big lead time. So we’ve we structured our entire process around user testing knowing that maybe a month from now, we’ll have a user testing session and we need to have something ready for that and that’s been great because that’s really focused on.
Now user testing sessions always start with 10 15, maybe 20 minutes of questions and warm up. That’s another thing that children require because there’s no screen but you know because there’s nothing so child to see or physically play with children need a lot of warming up before they’re going to to speak to her speak to a device in front of her design researcher.
But yeah, we get some 15-20 minutes of really good insight into. Into the household into how parents are using it how children are using it how they use it together when they use it and then we move on to this of task-based approach where we will have a prototype will take them through that prototype.
Ask them loads of questions about it and and those have been really useful sessions. We’ve sort of iterated and homes things as we’ve gone through. On the very last session we did was actually using a real device with the real skill on it. So the first the first six sessions were all Wizard of Oz testing where we were spoofing a device basically, but by the time we got to the last one, we had a device we had a skill that was developed enough that we were able to take kids through it and at that point suddenly the focus shifted from.
The usability of what we were designing to suddenly the technology and at that point we found that a lot of our era paths that we had did work really well children were. You know as did struggle to be understood by like so as much as we expected and those are a pass really kicked in and acted as really good safety nets that that meant children didn’t get too frustrated.
Kane:Â Hmm and you had so so that researchers then translated into all of the sort of design work that you’ve done and you were kind of when we spoke previously you kind of you mentioned that that you’ve got these kind of twelve principles of side design practices if. Ike and I know that obviously you’re going to be speaking about this mobile ux London, so maybe maybe we can keep some for those that are attending there without without without spoiling the surprise somewhat but I’m wondering over the in take us through some of them and then he’s, you know talk a little bit about the principles and how they care about how you learn and how you kind of crafted them.
Paul:Â So the principles are quite a recent thing that we’ve put together we launched the skill on September the 3rd and we we saw brought everyone together. Sue sessions and we ran through all of our research, we pulled out all of the insights from the last six months and we went through all of those and we ask people to contribute what they thought the principles that we’ve learned.
From all of these research sessions were and we put them all together and we had about 250 different principles that people have come up with and so we Affinity sorted those and and pulled themes out and push them all together and and we came back with 12 different principles that we’ve got and I am going to cover some of them mobile ux London.
But not all of them. I’ve talked about some of them previously another event and they ultimately they’re gonna go on BBC current UK forward slash gel but the shout out for the gel team there where there’s loads of how-to articles, but I can’t talk about a few of them. So one one thing that you might have noticed cane when you’ve been using the skill is that you never here.
Alexis voice you never hear a smart speaker. Its and that is by Design we found in our very early testing that when you put Alexis Voice next to mr. Tumble, or hey donkey that it falls completely flat. She does not have the she doesn’t have the range of emotion in her voice and she doesn’t speak the way that you speak to a child and it would really fall flat when you move from one to the other.
So we made the decision really early on to banish like pizza and. And that was that was like a really big principle to us that you shouldn’t talk to Children using synthesize, you know monotone cold voice. You should use a real voice to speak to children. So that was one of our principles
Kane: Before we finally kind of move on. I’m just wondering whether you mentioned that going forward will be more stories put in there and it’ll be something that carries on kind of enhancing. How do you approach design going forward when you have a essentially now a commitment to use pre-recorded audio as such.
Paul: Rebecca who is one of the CBeebies presenters? And children’s team is based up here in Salford. And so she is literally in a building across the road from us. So getting access to record with Rebecca is quite easy. So really, we just the entire children’s department is set up to efficiently record with talent and we’ve got lots of people that help us organize that.
I’m really we just have to be organized and stay on top of it and make sure that we’ve got big file that lists everything that needs to be said in the scale. I’m and we make sure that we plan around we’re back as availability which had a situation last week where we found out that Rebecca was going to be in panto for the whole of December and we had some recording that she needed so we had to move quite quickly to make sure that we could get everything we needed for the rest of the year recorded by her.
So it does put a little bit of pressure on but but it’s definitely worth it and we wouldn’t. We would never fall back on using using Alexis voice for the reason, you know that I outlined before so really it’s just a case of being organized and staying on top of it. It seems like BBC NPR these media companies.
Dustin: It seems like your moat and a lot of ways in this voice space where Kane you or I were not going to necessarily be able to hire voice talent for the skills. We built and we can certainly recorded ourselves, but. That having that voice talent in there makes for such just a polished experience overall and it’s something that the BBC obviously is a very well-established and doing I imagine though that requires a lot of upfront planning on your part of a lot of upfront testing as well because if we’re using Alexa and we need to we find we’ve got an error or something just Falls flat with our users we can go in and we can change the text. But I imagine that you needed to do a lot of testing up front to make sure that you weren’t going back to her every single day and going actually sorry I need to regroup record that cemented yesterday.
Paul:Â Yes, the the whole team pictures and so we only record with Rebecca. Once we actually you know, we finalize something and we’re happy with that. We use Catherine who is our ux writer as I sort of Aldi off-brand Rebecca because she grew up in Wales and Rebecca’s from Wales as well.
And so she does a mean impression of that and and that’s actually been really useful. At one point I was mr. Tumble as well and very good. It’s almost but what was really good about that was we were actually able to certify with Amazon without Rebecca. So the very first time we certified the skill.
It was all Catherine’s voice in there. We’ve recorded that and it is it and then when it came to recording with Rebecca, She just she have to shut the scripture we recorded with her and we were just able to replace the files in things in an S3 bucket and Amazon never notice the difference, you know, they didn’t pick up on that.
So that’s a really useful thing that we’re able to do to make sure that recording with Talent, you know isn’t a blocker for almost any of it. The only thing it would block us on doing would be actually launching but we can pass it through certification through beta testing through user testing all using.
I’ll deal friend voices and all pitching in really.
Dustin:Â So I just want to back up for a second. Can we get your best? Mr. Temple? Can we get an off-brand? Mr. Temple? What would he say?
Paul:Â It’s me Justin. That’s kind of a that’s not too bad. I’ll put I’ll put the it’s me Justin because that’s what he says in this kill.
Kane:Â I’ll put that in there after that and it’s not too bad, right? Hello. It’s just in thanks.
Paul:Â Yeah, I’m copying the previous Aldi off-brand Justin. Shout out to Johnny Artie who did very good. Just an impression. I just copied the way he did it and yeah. We all pitch in I think I think another point to make about recording with Talent.
It’s that we do it because it’s the kids skill, but we also do it because this is not like a task-based skill that has anything so to Dynamic in it. It’s really quite static skill where it’s just lots of branches and and we cover all eventualities for something that has Dynamic content like the BBC skill for instance.
Has different podcast names and obviously we can’t have talent coming all the time. So to cover that so that that does use a sin synthesized voice. I took use Alexis voice basically, so so not only is it difficult for for everyone to do it’s also not necessary and sort of borderline impossible if your skill requires, you know, making a call to an API and data that changes.
Dustin:Â Did you find the kids when they use this girl for the first time that they’re confused at? There’s another voice coming through is Alexa handing it off to the BBC skill in any way nowadays.
Paul:Â No. No, I didn’t they experience that. I think I think because we had well, we had an off-brand an off-brand Rebecca who isn’t, you know, very close to The Voice.
They they just so fun with it, you know kids don’t don’t question it too much on what one of the children and one of the parents actually thought that my impression of Justin was Justin. So so you happy without that without the pictures. Yeah people seem to Just Go With It. Yeah, that’s always my problem.
Dustin:Â So these are characters that are well-known own enough to the kids that they’re expecting something other than Alexa to speak back to them.
Paul:Â Yeah. Absolutely that the reason that we used Rebecca the Richie got selected in the neretva narrator. It’s because she does she’s a presenter on CB so she does all the links between the programs.
So she was like a really real natural to do the links between the games and the stories. So we kind of viewed the skills as an. Extension of the TV channel CBB so, you know turn off the TV, you know say Alex opencv. So you basically continue in the same universe that was the idea.
Kane: That’s wicked that and and what about the so I don’t know if this is another principle and and you can maybe talk about that it is but so recording voices and not using Alexis was put there is also a heavy Reliance on on sound effects and on music and stuff like that. So is there is there an overhead in that respect as well? And maybe it’s all the heads of wrong word because the the experience is actually fantastic and dust in your mentioned in there. The people get caught out a little bit when it’s not Alexa. I. Actually was caught out a little bit in the kitchen this week when I was testing it out because I’m so used to test in skills Island and the vast majority of them do just use Alexa.
And when I started this I expected it to be fairly good expected it to sound pretty good. But I didn’t expect it kind of almost. Wow me as such it was it was really kind of obviously professional Jermaine and it’s and it’s not just because of the voices. It’s also because of the music and the sound effects and all that kind of stuff.
So what goes into that as a designer Paul, do you kind of specify the kind of music that you want? And if so, what’s the process of getting all of them sound effects and music together?
Paul:Â Well, believe it or no, I’m absolutely thrilled that you that you liked it. But but we’re not we’re not a hundred percent happy with the sounds that are in there at the moment.
We’ve got lots of little things in there and they all come from the same family, but I think we wanted to do maybe a bit more with them. I caught it. I caught like when people on podcasts that are quite honest and talk about things that didn’t go so well, so I’m going to do that. So our our approach to sound design on this not as rigorous as we would have liked.
It can’t it’s which kind of left it till quite late in the process all of the sounds that you hear in the scale. Ah, a placeholder sounds that we put in thinking we would replace them later when the time came to launch. We almost sort of run out of time. We want it to have a much stronger ux approach to picking these sounds you wanted to design them.
We wanted we did loads of research into how to do sound design and what these sound should be doing. We wanted to write a brief and have somebody composed The Sounds basically. And in the end we you know, we weren’t able to fulfill my I had this amazing vision of meeting also send a brief to you know to a sound design and he’d come back with something and I’d say, you know, turn that up a bit or clever bit more bass.
I thought you know big fantasy of mine was to do that and we never quite got to that point because it’s a digital product would be able to change them in the future. I’m glad you’ve not noticed. That’s that’s quite good. That means that at least the sounds we paid which were just stuck sounds are doing a good enough job, which was kind of our view at the time.
But but I’ll process for picking the world was literally we sat down with the editorial team who we work very closely with we all picked a few sounds and then we decided on the ones that we thought were most appropriate. Like I said, they all come from the same family so that they sound. But they still work well together.
But yeah, I think in future we might improve those even more. Mmm.
Kane:Â That’s a nice Stroke of Luck then and so. On with the principles then the first principle being try not to ever hear Alexis voice. I don’t use Alexis voice use talent to record the the audio what musical other some of the other side principles that you that you’ve come up with.
Paul: So another one of our principles is a really big might seem like an obvious one, but don’t ask rhetorical questions. Because children will try and answer them. We how do you mean so one point well in the school at the moment you say you want to play a game? you will hear someone say. let’s listen and find out who’s here to play and then you’ll hear.
Two characters and then you’ll be asked who do you want to play with? That’s a question that you can answer but we previously had it so that said who’s here to play and then you would get the two characters and almost every time children would answer that question and in answer when the device wasn’t listening it wasn’t a question.
It was just sort of Rebecca going. You said Supply and then and then it sort of as a prompt for the two characters to speak but kids would say things like let’s say their own name or they’d say like mommy’s here to play or they’d say who they wanted to be here to play and they wouldn’t hear the characters and then when they’re asked who do you want to play with they they would offer miss that question, you know, so so making sure you don’t use rhetorical questions.
Is that really key. Because that kind of leads onto another principle, which is that children like want to answer everything and they want to answer right away. So so this if you’re asking a question and I think this is a this is a principle for all ages. If you’re asking a question, make sure that you end the sentence with it and listen for an answer immediately.
Don’t ask the question and then find a bit of follow-up information and then go to a prom. Yeah, you should make sure that the sentence and with the question so it could be answered immediately and it’s really true for kids because they’re so enthusiastic when they when they got a question does that that’s the fun part for for a voice device for a child it’s being able to talk back to it.
So they’re going to want to do that soon as they hear a question. So make sure that that’s at the end of the sentence. I think that’s you know, a really really solid principle that we have now.
Kane: Hmm, does that mean that you need to on the interactive side? I know there’s a story feature which will say or just read you the story. You know, I kind of read the whole story to you. But on the game side, it does that mean then because kids are so Keen to speak. Does that mean you need to keep whatever the device is doing fairly short and succinct.
Paul:Â Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Kane:Â Yeah, and on the rhetorical questions one, you mentioned that if you say who’s here to play in the kids that answer and I think that for me that from what you were saying, that’s a highlight another reason why actually doing research in the first place is so important because if you didn’t do any research at all, then you wouldn’t even realize that that’s what’s happening, which is not as if the device is going to tell you if it’s not listening.
Paul:Â Absolutely. Yeah, we when we Define these principles we looked back through all the research. And we were absolutely laughing at our first attempt since of March and April at the navigation how we had you know, what we thought might work for children. We’ve come a really long way and there’s six months and yeah, it’s been yeah, it’s been an incredible process going from from getting it very wrong, too.
Can it last wrong? I think so Okay. So we’ve got never never use Alexis voice don’t use rhetorical questions always end the if you’re going to ask a question, then end your segment with the question rather than rub it in on afterwards. Well, we’ve got two examples of that. So a bad example would be who do you want to play with you can play with Justin or Andy?
If you say who do you want to play with they’ll answer straight away. So what you should say, it’s just in an under here. Who would you like to play with? That works a lot better. It’s only a subtle thing. But it actually means that children will be listening when you give them the information. They need to answer the question and not vice versa.
Kane:Â That’s the the subtleties aware everything falls down. No, I think I’m in the process and maybe while time this is out out of kind of published it but I’m in the process of writing an article which is all around the multimodal aspect of things.
So how a screen can give you a response faster than audio I can do and how you can look at an image and you can process that image or you can skim through, you know, a sentence or paragraph at X quicker than you can sit and listen to it. So. When it comes to formula and responses, you know being succinctly and being kind of brief if you can be if you know ends up or it might not feel that important at that moment in time, you know to have a screen to tell you the answer to a some more calculation that you’ve asked for might not feel that important because the device so, it’s Audio Only the device will repeat the question 9 times 12 is X.
Wow, where is the screen will just give you the answer and over time. If you’re in a relatively complex interaction or interactive kind of environment all the time. All them little subtleties all added together end up being the experiences either longer than it should have been or it’s a bit more boring than it could have been so I think that although that’s a salty.
I think the subtleties are actually where the magic happens in this.
Paul:Â Absolutely. Yeah, I mean. Literally two or three words can make a massive difference to how somebody will respond a good example of that. You know, another one of our principles is around how sensitive children are so so none of our past that we have put the blame on the child because children you should almost treat children who are using the voice device like you would.
Elton John, you know, you have to pick your words make sure you don’t make them angry or upset, you know, and because we made a mistake so we had we had an error prompt that said sorry. I didn’t understand what you said and there were two words on there were three words on there that were unnecessary that made this particular child feel really bad.
He was struggling to speak anyway, and as soon as it came back and said to him, sorry, I didn’t understand what you said. He focused on the last two words what you said. He really took it to me. I’ve misspoken. I’m the one who’s to blame here and with children that you know, they are very very sensitive and he was he really sort of went into a shell.
We really struggled in that user testing session to get a lot out of him because he felt so. So, you know par speaking because he felt like he was at fault. So one of our principles is that it’s never used language or tone to make a child feel as though they’re to blame. So instead of saying sorry.
I didn’t understand what you said. We now just say oops. I still don’t understand so we take the blame. I think that’s a really good ux principle for for any skill, you know, always take the blame never put it on on the user because ultimately the personally well the party in. Situation is probably to blame is the Smart speaker not being very good at listening to you, you know.
And maybe we should say sorry, you know, the NLP is not very good. But you know, I don’t think it doesn’t go down well in certification, but but yeah, ultimately we take the blame and so the child’s never made to feel bad because that’s kind of the BBC children’s Mantra like we don’t make children cry that’s like the number-one Rule and so those those those three words what you said.
Taking those out that subtlety had a massive impact, you know or would have done for that child. We think pretty good principle. Yeah, they make children cry.
Kane:Â Yeah Wicked you mentioned in terms of earlier on USA and around kind of that you’re able to replace some of the audio with some newly recorded audio and you didn’t have to go through the certification and stuff sounds as though you’re working on this source of all the time.
What’s the kind of. Update kind of frequency like that is something that’s always updating and I are you always updating or fixing things. Are you always release a new stuff? And what was it like in terms of the maintenance and constant Improvement of this stuff?
Paul: So start of October we released stories. So when we first launched in September, we had three games in the scale then in September and October. Sorry, we added four stories and. Last week we added a new height of he game which I would highly highly recommend you get to create your own unique song. It’s fantastic. Everyone should check that out.
If you could include a load of clips of that, that’d be amazing because the music for that is. The level Atelier today, we’re learning our music badge and we need your help to make us some first things first. We need to pick a beat a be two weeks from now. We’re going to be adding some more stories do weeks after that.
We’ll be adding another game and we’re trying to get into. They still too weak release cycle where every two weeks are out in either new stories or new games or maybe something new and different even than that. No spoilers. But but yeah, we’re trying to make sure that the skill is sticky and that users keep coming back.
We develop that as a habit. How do you let them know that there’s something new coming down the pipe or that there’s something new that they can try. We have recently done a piece of work around sign posting new content drops. So they will be presented with with a new piece of content for probably a week and that’s something that we’re trying out for the first time to find out whether or not that does.
You know, it does ensure that that kids are trying out the new content because that’s our goal ultimately is to let children, you know know that there is new content and also to kind of give them a push into it because all of the games that. That we’re releasing all the stories that were out doing.
They’re all just experiments to us. Each game has got a different game mechanic by Design because we want to find out what what game mechanics work well for voice we want to find out which stories work well for voice so so yeah, it’s really in our interest to have a really big billboard in the skill that says the hey ducky games here try this out and and yes success for us is.
Kids trying all the games. It’s the breadth of content being enjoyed because it will learn more that way and are you showing speaking to them that billboard based on their usage or is everyone getting that the moment everyone’s getting that when we will be to call this piece of work. We had like a number of levers that we wanted to pull.
We thought it might be nice if we could find out how many times the user had been in the skill and perhaps only put it in front of them three times. So it didn’t get annoying but there is a big big piece of work going on around gdpr and storing data. And so to begin with we’re just going to do it manually and we’re going to put it in the skill for seven days so that you know, there are four new stories or there’s a new game and then we’ll take it off then you have a week of.
If that beings of nothing new and then and then after that you have a new content drop again. And that way they’ll be a little bit of contrast so it won’t it won’t be the skill where it’s always telling you. There’s something new will be a case of something new for a week. Then we go to such status quo for a week and then some things new again for a week.
And yeah, I think that contrast is really important. Shayla that’s just our best guess and that’s what as with all things that we do in New York state at the BBC but put forward our best guess and then we use data to validate.
Kane: That sounds as though that’s I mean, It’s a fairly tight sort of time scale eyes. And every two weeks is a must be must be you know, you must be thinking quite far in advance in terms of the stuff that you’ve been working on. You’ll see you must know next week what’s coming up in the next month ideas for what’s happening. So it seems it seems as though there’s some fairly rapid sort of work being done.
Paul:Â Absolutely whether the six months we spent and. Working on this did involve working on more than just what we lost with so we kind of work like that The Simpsons like the way the way the Simpsons worked was they would do a load of episodes have them all in production and then the season would start and they’d have a few, you know, sort of starts up ready to go.
And we you know, we work in much the same way we’ve got we’ve got things that are finished now that we’re holding back basically.
Kane: Somewhere podcasts teleworking it and but it’s interesting the way you described that I think first time we spoke you were talking about the concept of skills within skills. So typically everyone who creates our most people that create skills. They will create an interactive story. That’ll be a skill. They’ll create another story. That’ll be another skill, you know, I’ll have the ambient sounds because really popular so you have one skill which does Fireside sounds another skill that does thunderstorms.
And that seems to be what Amazon kind of the pushing you have specific skills that do specific stuff. You’ve kind of turned this almost into like an app that does all kinds of stuff and rather than having a lot and lot of skills all over the place and do lots of different stuff. There’s one skill. That’s the entry point into CBeebies in the voice kind of world. And then from there, you’ve got a whole breadth of content. How was that decision made?
Paul:Â All that decision happened before I joined the team by I ask the same question. It dawned on me at one point that that we were going against some of the grain of the platform.
You know, I have nothing set up to cater for skills within skills or certainly wasn’t at the time. I think we’ve got skill connections now. But that’s quite primitive still just allows you to print I think in another reason another scale, but but I know the BBC has like such big Ambitions for voice, but we wanted a single front door.
That’s so that we could you know, ensure consistency trust and also avoid fragmentation. You know the BBC’s got a lot of mobile apps and I think what we wanted was that single front door. Everything was sort of in one place because we know how difficult Discovery is on voice and we don’t want to make that even harder by separating the products or separating the games, you know, and there’s definitely something to be said for once they’re through that front door.
We can show them our entire library of games and stories. It was a strategic decision and and. That has been difficult has been some some real challenges with that. It’s actually possible to run out of utterances within a skill. So the just inside and seek game that you described where you have to find a little monster that is a game where you’ll hear a sound and you have to identify what that sound is.
So obviously you building. A lot of different utterances to cover, you know, the sound of water for instance. It could be a bath that could be addressed. It could be a splash. It could be water all these different things. But when you when you put those words and attach them to an intense as we have to you then can’t use them elsewhere.
So we’re kind of in this in this wig world where I have to be really careful about the words we use and. I want to make sure that if we need to use the word in one skill that we haven’t used it another in one game. We haven’t used it in another game. So that’s been really difficult.
Kane: So does that mean then that if you did do that? Oh different scenario, does that mean that let’s say for example, if you are in one game and you then make an utterance that is actually an utterance. That’s for a different game. What happens then? Is that just so so unlikely that there’s no point in really considering it
Paul: That is quite likely we’ve had that we’ve had to manage that you wouldn’t be able to do that.
Basically, there’s no there’s no way we can listen for a specific word and say if you’re in this state do this if you’re in that state do that because the. This is the things like a Json file of intense that you have is completely flat. There’s like no hierarchy to it. I’m speaking in way too much.
They sell that salt and stuff. I don’t know about really this is. Well the teams tell me and we’ve had we’ve had a few meetings about this where we have like a repository of words and we were creating new experiences and we actually check that and make sure that things aren’t crushing. The just in game is actually a huge huge offender because the right there is one specific right answer, you know, we wouldn’t be able to say no to say.
One of the answers was just bath and you can only say bath because it’s identifying a sound but that we would we basically wouldn’t create that game again. Now knowing what we know but who’s to say in the future that the platform won’t change and that we won’t be able to use, you know, the same words elsewhere, but for the time being we’re really having to manage that so that’s been a big challenge.
But again, it’s just about being sort of rigorous and organized and mindful and I’m really about us all working together. So so, you know a game isn’t created in isolation, but the editorial team, you know, we all work together on and everything to do with the BBC kids skill to make sure that we’ve all got visibility what’s going on that we don’t accidentally tread on each other’s toes.
Kane:Â Hmm. Yeah, it’s quite a design challenge that I’m assuming that there must have been other challenges that you faced in having all of these things within one skill, you mentioned once that thing around getting people to discover new content and stuff like that and put up on was Billboards. If you like what are some of the other challenges then that you face in terms of getting all of this content within one skill and then having people navigate around it was some of the other side design challenges your fist
Paul: One of the design challenges is the number of files you can have in a row audio files that play So I was in let you have five files in a row audio files that can play any more than that and the skill will fail and shut down you’ll get an error. So if you’re going through navigation and we’re playing sounds for that and then you go into a game.
The scale doesn’t know that we’ve got a game inside its care doesn’t know that it just knows how many files if you play it. So we’ve had to do loads of combining a files. So where you might hear a sort of it an audio tone and then you’ll hear Rebecca say something and then she might say something else.
It sounds like it’s a different audio file. We’ve actually to combine all those together to make sure that we don’t exceed that limit of five files and that we don’t, you know, don’t exceed the amount of time as well. It can be. That could be taken up with those five files. So there’s a few limitations from the platform that cause a problem and another issue is that because we are adding individual parts to the skill all the time when we when we pass it through certification as an ass cause if you know, we’d like to go through a beta process.
I think they pass that over to. They pass over to a third party and quite often. What we’ll get back from that beta feedback will get is on other parts of the scale that have already been certified so a bit like I’m you know, every time we get told the same thing about you know that we we talked on was it about and agreed so yeah, occasionally like the same feedback will come back time and time again, and we just want to say no you were only certifying for new stories or you know, something like that so so that’s been.
No, yeah not challenging. But yeah. Slight difficulty.
Kane:Â Yeah, that’s interesting about it. I didn’t realize in terms of the audio file. So that does that mean then that if you enter it skill or it or what have you then if you play an audio file after every single response then essentially the user can only have five responses.
Paul:Â Is that know though? So it’s five audio files in a row. If you interrupt it with a prompt, that’s fine. But where we come into if users with our help file. So if you go into a helpful, if you say, you know, if you say help will play a help file for you and that’s that’s one and then you might go back to your part of the skill.
That’s then got five files in a row. So that would be six altogether. So we’ve had to be really smart and look for opportunities where in our user flows where we can combine. Files together right?
Kane:Â Fantastic. Well Paul this has been absolutely fantastic that I would definitely recommend everyone check out that skill.
You have heard it throughout this episode and terms of their quality, even though Paul has been saying that some of the Sounds in there or what they wouldn’t have preferred to use. I think it’s absolutely spot on it. The BBC are absolutely killing it from from a from a voice perspective and I can’t wait to see what happens Next is the CBB skill is now mine and I were little boys. Go to skill in the kitchen. So that’s definitely going to be useful as from now on so Paul. Thank you so much for joining us being absolutely immense.
Paul:Â Oh, you’re very welcome. And yeah, thanks for having me and yeah, keep enjoying the skill and keep an eye out for new stories in a couple of weeks time
Kane: Wicked and where can people kind of follow the work that the BBC are doing or reach out to you online. Where’s the best place for people to go to keep track of all this stuff?
Paul:Â Yeah, so at BBC. You XD on Twitter and Instagram, that’s the ux and design departments social and I made by Magnolia on the same social networks because Paul Jackson’s quite a boring generic name that’s very difficult to get Social handles for so yeah, I made by Magnolia and yeah always look for for talking about the BBC kids skill and voice.
Kane:Â Fantastic, and Paul will also be on mobile ux London on the 21st of November. You can get your tickets at mobile ux London.com and I’ll be hosting the event as well. So I’m looking forward to seeing you there as well Paul.
Paul:Â Yeah be great to meet you in person.
Kane:Â Exactly. Nice one Paul. Thank you very much.
That’s when we could just take care. That was a Paul Jackson of the BBC real real innovators in this place the BBC in the voice World. Obviously the pedigree that they have is unrivaled globally, you know fully fully. Really kind of immerse themselves into this team at 12:12. What was it 12 designers?
That’s just working on the design side the on the ux side. And so the really really invested in this do check out the CBeebies skill. It’s well worth checking out. If you’ve got kids I even if you don’t have found it funny the baby wasn’t even with us. I was just playing with it in the kitchen. But yeah, it’s really good love what Paul was talking about there.
You know, there’s so much detail into other principles. Let’s recap the principle. So never use Alexis voice. Don’t ask rhetorical questions, which you shouldn’t do should you end your sentences with the question? Rather than asking the question then Define it more and never use language that bill blames the child.
That’s a good Principle as well. Really interesting concept what they’ve got going on with putting skills within skills and having all these various stories and you know interactive games and stuff within one skill as a really Innovative way of looking at it. I’ve never come across anything like that before although I do think invoked apps and Nick Schwab there really something that compiles all of their soundscapes into into a single skill.
But it’s still it’s still fairly fairly new and fairly fairly different. So, yeah, thank you Paul for sharing those insights that was absolutely fantastic for the work that you’ve been doing is is unbelievable really really appreciate you taking the time to speak to us and we’ll see you Paul and some of your listeners out there hopefully mobile ux London on the 21st of November 21st of November.
Thank you Dustin as well for co-hosting that was immense until next time boys and girls see you later. See you next time for more great fun in Justin’s house.
