2019 Awards Preview: Most Effective Voice Assistant App

Ahead of our 2019 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, staged in partnership with our headline partner Dynata, and our partners DAX and TabMo, well be previewing the nominees in each category, giving you a glimpse at the high quality of entries weve seen this year. In today’s preview, we look at the campaigns shortlisted for the Most Effective Voice Assistant App Award.

BBC Good Food and Hi Mum! Said Dad – BBC Good Food Alexa Skill
BBC Good Food is the UK’s number 1 food media brand across print, digital and live. However, with smart speakers becoming the fastest-growing consumer technology, the evidence suggested that for BBC Good Food to remain the UK’s number 1, voice was imperative. Google reported in 2016 that 20 per cent of all searches on mobile were done by voice and ComScore has predicted that voice will account for 50 per cent of all search queries by 2020. Research also suggest that around 50 per cent of smart speakers are based in the kitchen.

BBC Good Food and Hi Mum! Said Dad faced two challenges: to be the go-to VUI (Voice User Interface) cooking experience; and to come up with new ways to monetise the content. given that the ads the BBC Good Food serves on its website can’t be served on Echo devices.

The Skill’s main USP is that it enables hands-free cooking, so key to its success was to look at how people actually cook and how the Skill could alleviate any pain points and get the user to the one recipe they wanted from the 11,000 recipes in the BBC Good Food store cupboard – all without visual cues.

To do this, they had to consider the most popular search intents for users, such as available ingredients, dishes, diet types, time (e.g. ‘quick’), difficulty (e.g. ‘easy’), cuisine, course and chef, and design questions to ensure that they extracted the precise information we needed in a predictable, unambiguous format that Alexa could query against the database effectively.

The solution was to enable a range of conversational commands with filtering criteria baked in – for instance: “Alexa, Ask BBC Good Food for a quick and easy meal for four, using chicken and tomatoes”. With that single sentence, five filters are applied effortlessly – 2x ingredients, time to cook, difficulty level and serving size.

To optimise the listening experience, Hi Mum! Said Dad restructured the content, breaking instructions down into smaller lines, considering pacing and including functionality for enhanced control, such as pausing, repeating and bookmarking so that users can pick up right where they left off.

The agency also reviewed typical pain points with cookbooks and screen displays and found that the most common annoyance is the separation of recipe method and ingredients. The instruction “add the sugar” is typically met with the question, “how much sugar?” and so they enabled the link between these traditionally separated elements for a seamless walk through. Users could simply ask “how much?” and the Skill would confirm this instantly.

The combined effect of the enhanced search flow, voice tailored content, pacing controls and the bridging of method steps and ingredient quantities make for a genuinely hands-free cooking experience.

To monetize the app, Hi Mum! Said Dad integrated with online retailers to monetize the purchase of ingredients via an affiliate arrangement, and produced unlockable premium content.

Since its launch, Amazon has recognised the Skill as one of the best recipe Skills in the world, to the point where Alexa now directs all recipes searches in the UK and Ireland to BBC Good Food by default. User numbers were shared with the judges in confidence and are impressive.

Audible and Hi Mum! Said Dad – Audible Book Finder Alexa Skill
The challenge for Audible and Hi Mum! Said Dad with this campaign was to leverage the Alexa channel to improve member retention, and convert general Alexa users into Audible members.

With over 100,000 content experiences available on Audible, Hi Mum! Said Dad set out to create a Skill, that would help members and non-members discover their next audiobook.

It does this by leveraging complex data science models to surface results based on ratings, similar topics and writing styles to what members have liked before. Additionally, the Skill includes an inspiration feature, which takes listeners through recommendations from well-known authors and editors at Audible, along with an immersive story behind the suggestion.

For non-members, the Skill gives aims to convert general Alexa book searches by surfacing tempting titles, along with exclusive inspiration.
The Audible Book Finder Skill gives customers several different ways to find their next book or audiobook, including ‘What’s trending’; recommendations based on a title the user shares with the Skill; and ‘Surprise me’, which plays a clip at random from Audible editors, authors and celebrities, where they describe their favourite and most influential books and why they like them

After hearing their recommendation, customers can jump straight into listening to a sample or they can purchase the full audiobook as part of a free trial if they are eligible, or by using an Audible credit.

The Skill is built around three key pillars. First is the personal touch with personal recommendations for each user based on their listening history. Second is cognitive load: voice browsing is a lot more complex than web browsing so while designing the Skill, care was taken to reduce cognitive load as much as possible. This was overcome through visual cues, the introduction of pauses and considered pacing. And third was structuring the Skill so that users can get to a recommendation quickly.

The Skill is now considered so integral to Audible’s business model that Amazon – which owns Audible – decided to make a handoff from this Skill to the first-party Audible Skill experience on Alexa, where members can use credits to buy books and non-members can sign up to memberships. This is a first for Audible.

WaterAid and Hi Mum! Said Dad – WaterAid Voices Alexa Skill
In Madagascar, nearly half of the 24m inhabitants don’t have access to safe drinking water, and 88 per cent don’t have access to proper sanitation. These issues are fundamental to healthy, happy lives, yet fail to evoke the same emotional response as other equally pressing issues. With this in mind, WaterAid and Hi Mum! Said Dad set out to deliver an Alexa experience that brought the public closer to these issues in ways that feel relatable.

WaterAid Voices is a family-oriented interactive storytelling experience about life in Madagascar – a beautiful country but one that lacks clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene. It aimed to build an understanding of the impact of water, sanitation and hygiene on daily life; build ‘brand love’ for WaterAid; and develop insight that will inform a future voice/digital assistant engagement strategy for the organisation. Fundraising was not a direct objective for the project and the sill was designed for KS2 stage students.

While designing the Skill, Hi Mum! Said Dad drew key pieces of learning from research it had conducted to add creative polish. It incorporated animal sound clips to and also leveraged Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) to give Alexa character, such as the ability to whisper or make exclamations, to enrich the experience.

In its first month, WaterAid Voices was featured in Amazon’s “What’s new on Alexa?” email, which reaches every Alexa customer in the UK. It was also included in the “Amazon Staff Picks” section on the Alexa Store’s homepage. Earned and owned media has resulted in more than 1,200 enablements to date and represents an effective means for WaterAid to convey the importance of water, sanitation and hygiene to a wider audience. As one student put it: “I will definitely get this on my Alexa. I thought it was funny but I also learnt some new things too. I really liked the animal sounds and words from Madagascar.”

The Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony takes place in London on 14 November. To book your place at this celebration of the best in mobile marketing, click here.