Periscope voice assistant

Company: Periscope

Role: Conversation Architect, Voice UX Designer

Though Periscope had a beautiful office space and many lovely meeting rooms it was nearly impossible to remember where all those nice meeting rooms were because none of the names made any sense. Named anything from “Bear Claw” to “Limbo”, there’s no telling where that might be in Periscope’s 1,000’s of square footage.

Enter Periscope Bot.

The Connected Experiences team at Periscope developed a voice assistant for both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant that had plans to roll out as a chat bot as well. This internal tool was designed to assist with both room location and meeting room availability. In time the team hoped to expand the capabilities of the platform to give users the ability to book rooms, and eventually turn on and off lights as well.

the process

None of us had designed a voice interface before so we leaned pretty heavily on Google’s Conversation Design Guidelines, existing examples of similar functionality, and usability testing of our proposed prompts and responses (using human-to-human conversation as a proxy).

My favorite part of the process was learning and mapping all the various components that make up a conversation. The computer recognizes various parts of a question or statement and uses those as prompts for the system. I used examples like the one below as I designed the conversation flow for Periscope Bot.

Room location prompt

User: “Hey Periscope Bot, where is The Flex room?”

System: [Searches the database for match with implicit information “Flex room”]

Assistant: “The Flex room is on the second floor of P2 just to the right of the staircase.”

Available room prompt

User: “Hey Periscope Bot, what rooms are available right now?”

System: [Checks Google Calendar API]

Assistant: “Mezzanine, Anywhere, and Purgatory are available for the next half hour.”

Development lead: Jon Voth

Developer: Charly Renk