Why should you care about voice? Ask The Drum Alexa app and find out

First, we had to decide what kind of app we wanted to produce. Our intention was to devise something that could leverage The Drum’s editorial expertise while also providing the perfect accompaniment to this special voice issue. The idea we settled on was to create a call-and-answer app whereby the user could ask questions about voice technology and our own editor, Gordon Young, would provide the answers in his inimitable Scottish drawl.

To make that idea a reality, we needed to get some experts on board to help us. Cue Apadmi, the UK-based app developer, which took the questions we’d imagined a user would want to ask and turned them into a functioning interaction model. One of its first tasks was to deal with the issue that users can find myriad different ways to phrase the same question.

“Using a tool to auto-generate variations, I transformed the original seven questions into over 1,000 variations, which were fed into Amazon’s machine learning model to ensure that no matter what the user asks, Alexa always understands the question,” explains Apadmi software engineer Patrick Cavanagh.

One of the challenges with voice interfaces is how users discover content when they don’t have the visual prompts and icons that serve as wayfinders for screen-based apps. “With The Drum Voice skill, discovery is a more pressing issue as we need users to ask fairly specific questions in order to hear the insight of Gordon on that topic,” says Cavanagh.

Thankfully, he’d factored in a solution. “To help mitigate this and ensure that users get the most out of the skill, we’ve put some effort into prompting users to ask questions that they haven’t asked before, by keeping track of those already asked within the skill itself. We also offer example questions to the user when they ask for help or ask a question that the skill doesn’t understand.”

With the mechanics developed, all that was left was to get Gordon into London’s superb Scramble Studios to record his answers – and as the ever patient and professional senior sound designer Dave Cooper discovered to his peril, this was perhaps the most challenging part of the process altogether.

As Young himself says, the idea of recording the app in his voice “seemed a great idea until it came to the actual recording session, where I developed a new found-respect for voiceover artists”. After a few hasty revisions to the script and an impromptu elocution lesson to make Young’s Glaswegian brogue a little more decipherable, Cooper and co had something to work with. “Big thanks to Dave and the team for spending longer than expected editing out all my fluffs,” Young says.

So how did it turn out? Well, you can hear for yourself by asking your Alexa device: ‘Alexa, enable The Drum Voice’. Once that’s done, you can ask it a range of questions about voice tech, including ‘Alexa, ask The Drum Voice about challenges facing voice tech’ and ‘Alexa, ask The Drum Voice why I should care about voice right now?’

We won’t give too much away, but it’s safe to say Gordon wasn’t joking when he said the world’s great (or even just mediocre) voice actors shouldn’t be quaking in their boots just yet. Our advice? Get the experts in. In fact, turn to page 26 to find out what happened when The Drum caught up with the world’s most famous voice actor.

For more on voice technology, pick up a copy of The Drum's July issue where we speak to Susan Bennett (AKA the voice of Apple’s Siri); find out how AI assistants are being utilised in sectors such as retail, charity, healthcare and education; discover how it is opening up the internet to older generations and the visually impaired; and ask what it means to be 'voice native'.