Canary Voice Design
Company: The Economist
Challenge
Our goal was to create a more engaging experience through voice following on our model from the espresso voice skill. I realized text-to-speech for articles was not the best way to serve up content. It would mispronounce words, it was far less interesting, and offered a less branded and delightful experience.
Solution
Working with audio assets, we set out to tailor a voice experience that would utilize the economist branded podcasts. This meant we could make an interactive podcast where the user could listen to a brief overview of news on a daily or weekly basis and be able to navigate to more articles through prompts in the experience.
Final User Flow
Value Proposition
In this user flow we can see the main listening experience is linear and uses the "tasting menu" podcast as the main content. From that audio content, users will be able to jump to longer form audio articles if they choose to hear more on a particular story. The value here is that the experience is more human because the audio delivers branded content with music and well spoken hosts but now offers navigation and user choice without the dullness of a text-to-speech engine. Users can find free economist content on voice devices but with a subscription and ability to link their accounts, we can offer premium content like the audio articles from the digital editions.