Customers expect their interactions with Alexa to be quick, easy, and without friction. People tend to prefer their conversation partners to be brief and efficient (but not to the point of rudeness). Conversations with Alexa should move quickly and accomplish the task in as few steps as is necessary. Use simple sentence structures and concise language in your skill’s dialog to avoid exhausting or annoying customers or creating a high cognitive load with long lists of options. Avoid reading out lengthy data that can be sent to the customer’s Alexa app for reference such as phone numbers and email addresses.
Checklist for creating brief conversations:
▢ Take the minimal amount of steps to complete a task; Use the least amount of simple statements possible to communicate accurately and clearly
▢ Speak in active voice, not passive voice
▢ Write responses that can be read out by a human in one or two breaths
▢ Omit unnecessary asides and redundant information
▢ Give only one to a few options at a time, depending on the length or complexity of the options
▢ Send a card to the customer’s Alexa app when it needs to share information that’s easy to forget if it’s only read out verbally
Get to the point already! Customers lose interest in skills that take too long, and have too much dialog, before they get to the core content. If you’ve launched a skill already and notice customers aren’t engaging with the main functions of your skill, that’s a good indicator you’ve lost them sometime after “hello.”
Simple conversations should also use active voice instead of passive voice. Active voice always begins with the subject (the noun), followed by the action taken (the verb). For example, “To get the most out of this skill, you’ll need to link an account.” Passive voice uses more words with a higher cognitive load to communicate the same thing. For example, “To get the most out of this skill, an account needs to be linked.”
Listen to these examples of how a conversation designer reduced the time it takes to start a trivia game:
Long version
Customer: Alexa, start Seattle Super Trivia.
Alexa: Welcome back to Seattle Super Trivia. You can play trivia about all kinds of topics, and play the daily game. You last played yesterday. Ready to start the Daily Game?
Customer: Yes.
Alexa: You got it. First question in the daily game. When was the city of Seattle founded? … A. 1861. B. 1902., or C. 1792. Which one do you think it is?
Short version
Customer: Alexa, start Seattle Super Trivia.
Alexa: Welcome back to Seattle Super Trivia. Let’s start today’s challenge. First question. When was the city of Seattle founded? Was it … A. 1861. B. 1902., or C. 1792?