Designing for Voice

I design the voice experience assuming that the user will not have access to a screen. It forces me to think through conversational design, a user’s surroundings, and error handling in a way I never did before. Since voice expectations are constantly evolving, the most exciting part is when users find your solution to be intuitive and seamless.

When you write for voice, you're tapping into a fundamental behavior that’s been wired into people’s brains for two million years: spoken conversation. There's always this tension of wanting to make the voice experience feel natural and engaging while ensuring that the user is successful in achieving their goal at that moment. Lack of screen, ambiguous words, regional accents, noisy rooms... voice throws a ton of interesting challenges at you.

Designing for voice is all about understanding people’s intents, not only from what they say but also from a variety of other signals. Voice design is different from other design work I’ve done because it’s still such a new field and the tools, processes, and best practices are still not well-established. It’s exciting to be part of shaping the future of voice and solving tricky experience problems that have been around since the mid-90s.