“AYA” (ask your assistant), the new URL.

At the risk of dating myself, I remember when the world wide web was first getting going, the general public got pretty confused when they started seeing www.thisthing.com on marketing and advertising materials.

I remember my grandfather using his best curmudgeon voice asking ‘What the heck is this gibberish at the bottom of my TV guide. So I showed him, on a 56k AOL connection.  Not the most elegant of experiences.

And today we are looking up from the bottom of the hockey stick trend curve of voice and voice assistants in a similar moment of social awareness and education. The web evolved and was adopted over the better part of a decade.  Voice will accelerate much more quickly than that. Brands have a unique opportunity to be evangelists and begin to own their conversation.

Enter the ‘Ask Your Assistant’ phase of marketing and advertising.

One of the challenges of voice is letting your community, constituency and customers know you are participating.  The platforms will do that to some degree for us.  When a user asks a question that the assistant believes your voice app will answer, they will be prompted to enable your app.

But we can’t wait for that can we? No.  We cannot.

So just like ‘www’ has become normalized in our marketing and advertising channels, so too will AYA, ask your assistant.  A visual prompt in one channel, to push the user to another.

Just as vanity URL’s offer unique metrics to prove success and conversion for offline messages, so too can the questions we prompt the user with.

And (shameless plug) Voicify allows you to manage all the different variations of an inquiry you want to test and map them to the single answer that’s correct for that set.

So when Harley Davidson wants to drive users to their voice app in their HOG publication, the website, their mobile app & in store, they can manage the following voice intents:

HOG Publication
AYA: Ask Harley Davidson where I should ride this weekend.

Website
AYA: Where does Harley Davidson think I should ride this weekend?

Mobile App

AYA: Ask Harley Davidson to send a fun ride to my mobile.

In Store

AYA: Ask Harley Davidson where the nearest twisties are.

All of these ‘AYA’s’ are varied by verbage, but share an intent and thus mapped as equivalents, or synonyms to one another.  Any of these utterences are met with the ‘shared response,’ below.

Shared response: So you want to go to on a ride huh? We feel you.  How long a ride do you want to go on?

The metrics that come back will give you usage statistics mapped to the channel of origination, helping hone your omni-channel strategies, as well as delight and engage with your customers.

Voicify is excited to support this kind of multi-channel conversation and to allow brands, marketers and agencies using the Voicify Voice Experience Platform to deploy their apps across all voice platforms without the need for different development teams…or a development team at all.