In this episode, Teri welcomes Eric Sauvé, the Chief of Product and User Experience at Speebly.
Eric has been a serial entrepreneur for years and has started and built numerous startups, some of which were acquired by larger companies. He developed an interest in voice technology somewhere along the journey and ended up co-founding Speebly, a voice assistant program that can be used across multiple platforms.
Key Points From Eric!
How they are using voice technology (Siri) and the Apple Watch to help with handwashing during the current Covid-19 pandemic.
Focusing on Siri
Their initial inspiration was using Siri. The fact that Siri gives users a bunch of web results when she can’t answer a question gave him the idea of creating a seamless hand-off from Siri to the different web properties.
That would mean that a user could continue searching using their voice.
They have also worked with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, but their focus on Siri was informed by the fact that Siri has way more users.
Inspiration Behind Speebly
Their inspiration is based on the fact that when people are doing anything, they will either want to type or use their voice, and voice is, of course, the best option especially where there is a lot of text input.
Siri is a closed ecosystem compared to Alexa and Google on the speaker side of things, but it has a ton of users and an app environment of third-party developers. This is why they focus more on Siri.
Their main aim is to make it so that anyone who has an app can take advantage of voice search to drive traffic to their app or so that there can be a seamless handoff where a user asks Siri a question and they can keep talking to the app on their phone.
They released a software development toolkit (SDK) that app developers can put in their iPhone or Android projects to serve as the talking interface of their app.
The toolkit is also available for Apple watch OS and people can use it without their phones.
Helping With the Pandemic
They have been aiming at helping people understand that they could use voice in the context of smartphones and the Apple watch.
They’ve been working on an in-house app called Handwash Circles to encourage people to not only wash their hands but wash them long enough.
It’s a touch-less voice first hand wash timer. A user can say, “Hey Siri, start handwash” and the app will start a countdown timer for the appropriate amount of seconds that one is supposed to wash their hands.
They plan on implementing accelerometer and gyroscope features where the app can determine if someone has done a good job washing their hands.
The community feature of the app enables circles of people, for example, a person’s workplace to access data on their handwashing activities.
Studies have shown that there is an improvement in the quality of hand washing where people have devices on them to monitor their hand washing. They ensure people’s data privacy in different ways.
They are currently in the process of onboarding their first 10 organizations that are interested in implementing the use of the app at their workplaces.
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