Mimi, the Hipster Cat Voice Assistant - The hipster cat voice assistant for Alexa and Google 😸

@__tosh Thanks for asking! Creating a voice interface out of a rich-text chatbot with buttons, stickers and images is quite tricky, because the interface is so limited to just one type of input/output: the text. So, what I did is to improve the conversational UX and NLP (Natural Language Processing) and handle all responses where I expected the postback-input of a button also in written form e.g. when the cat asks "how are you?" you can answer now textually. In a voice interface you also cannot send links, so you need to think about that too (and possibly a new an upselling/sales strategy)! Another tricky thing was the phonetic pronunciation of words by the voice devices like Alexa or Google Home. I solved it by rewriting some worlds like renaming the cat's name from "Mica" to "Mimi". Interjections ("hmm" for instance) where also tricky because the devices "interpret" them differently, so I decided to remove some of them completely. Also in a voice interface you cannot (really) play with the avatar of the service. You add one to the landing page, but that’s it, the user will not see your avatar again! To give my Hipster Cat a unique touch, Mimi often says “Meow!” to give it some character. You can also play with Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) and add for instance whispering or emphasizing of words. Overall it was a very interesting experience and was much more challenging than launching on 'yet another messaging app'! :)

On every Android device from version 6 on <3

<3