Voice User Interface (VUI) Development: Building Conversational Web Experiences

The last couple of years have seen a paradigm shift in how people interact with websites and how they search online. With the rise of smart home devices like Alexa, people are now more likely to talk to a browser about what information they need, rather than type it. With the rise of smartphone users worldwide and the proliferation of 5G networks, this type of voice search is going to be the search method in future. Not only searching but even interacting with websites are going to be through voice-enabled features. This kind of VUI interface is going to revolutionize our web experience by making it seamless, intuitive and most importantly, personalized.

History of Voice User Interface or VUI

The present-day use of VUI is something that was in the realm of science fiction in the early years of the computer world. As early as the 1960s and 70s, developers and computer enthusiasts were working towards creating a base with research and development in speech recognition and synthesis.

As machine learning reached a breakthrough in the 1980s and 90s thanks to IMB and Bell Labs, there was a great leap in speech recognition. It was however in the telephone industry that VUI was being used with the introduction of Interactive Voice Response or IVR. It was here that machines were used to recognise human voice inputs and perform tasks accordingly. It soon became the backbone of all industries; from airlines helping you know your flight status to doing your banking services. All you need to do is call the IVR numbers and let the digital system do the rest.

But things became a little stagnant with that as this 2nd generation VUI came with lots of problems. The biggest one of them was speech recognition accuracy and there was a dearth of resources available to rectify it. The turn of the century saw the rise of smartphones, and suddenly, there was way more need for VUI than before. In 2011 came Siri from Apple which gave a big push to VUI technology. Now VUI is being used with AI or artificial intelligence and the earlier drawbacks like speech recognition accuracy increased exponentially due to it. Since then we saw the rise of VUI like Microsoft Cortona and Google Assistant. Suddenly, we were all speaking to devices, from asking our smart speakers to play our songs to asking our cars to reroute or find a route to our destination. And now, we are seeing the rise of conversational websites that let us browse the internet without using our fingers or typing in any input.

What are conversational websites?

Simply put, a conversational website is a website that uses conversational tools as well as AI to interact with the visitor in real-time. Most often, it is the landing page of the website and the VUI is used for guiding the visitor in navigating the website. Hence the visitor doesn’t need to rely on pre-built buttons and forms to access and use the website; the VUI, which is often a chatbot, helps the visitor find what they need. Conversational websites are becoming very popular for shopping websites as they enhance the shopping experience of the visitor as well as retain them on the website more than ordinary shopping websites.

Why are conversational websites the future

Now that you know what a conversational website is, before moving on to how to use VUI to build one, let’s first see what benefits such a website brings to a business.

1. The most important thing for an eCommerce website is connecting with its customers. Thanks to the internet, your customers can be from any corner of the world. So, your website should be ready for visitors 24/7; but it is not possible to man the website through human interaction for such a period. True big companies can do that, but what about small eCommerce websites? Hence the need for a conversational website. It can handle your queries and questions no matter what time it is on the clock. Most of the time, the queries and questions are of the same type, and feeding a model reply to the chatbot can make the process smooth. Such automated answers are helping not only shopping websites, but also airline websites as Norwegian Airlines has done. By creating a conversational website for their incoming queries regarding general things like flight status, the company has reduced the pressure on the support staff by as much as 20%. Not only that, but it has also freed the support staff to help customers with more important enquiries and pressing concerns.
2. With so many online shopping websites, catching the customers’ attention and making them come back is a big factor for any business. One of the ways to do this is by personalizing the user experience through conversational websites. When employed rightly, the AI in your website can learn from previous customer engagement and use the experience for new customers. The customers who visit don’t feel that they are getting generic answers, and this personalization makes them come back, even if it was their first visit. Not only that, if you are getting customers speaking different languages, you can use conversational websites to talk to them in their language and increase your customer base.
3. The third benefit conversational websites can bring to businesses, especially online shopping sites is providing a record of all engagement with a visitor while they are on their site. Most of the time, visitors leave without checking out after putting things in their e-cart. With the help of conversational AI, shopping websites can record this kind of situation and then review it and find a solution to why shoppers are not checking out. Further, they can be used along with trigger automated cart recovery software to gently alert shoppers that they have things in their cart. It has been proved that getting emails about abandoned e-carts often leads shoppers back to the website to complete the transaction.
4. It is not that only shopping or customer service websites benefit from conversational landing pages or having VUI in their web design. Recruitment websites, as well as companies that take in people all year through, have also benefited from introducing conversational AI and VUI in their websites. Having chatbots answer questions that are common and don’t need much information from a human team member, improves the efficiency of the business. With chatbots handling questions, the human members of the team can focus on hiring the right candidates. Companies also need less manpower in such cases, increasing strategic business growth.
5. Lastly, many shopping websites or product websites have so much to offer that they end up confusing first-time visitors. Incorporating conversational features in their website can help them tackle this issue. With AI and chatbots, businesses can guide undecided customers into high-value product pages and also act as a guide through their shopping journey. Virtual shopping assistance can increase the user experience of a website, something that is not only good for increasing the average order value but also the search ranking result of the website.

How to incorporate VUI in building a conversational web experience

There are many ways to build your website as a conversational web experience for visitors. Here are some of the basics VUI principals that you need to include in your design to achieve that.

Voice-first design

The first basic thing you need to do to incorporate VUI is to conceptualize your website with a voice-first design approach. This means you should from the very beginning think of a web design that doesn’t need the user to use either their hands or even their eyes. The screen for a VUI-based website should have the VUI element in focus. It should be such that users don’t even need to see the screen in detail to interact with it.
Of course, you will need to incorporate visual elements and guides in your website, but it should follow the initial approach of the visitor through voice input. Otherwise, if the user has to just listen to the product description and browse, he will feel bored. So, the best option is to start with voice and then use visual or touch interaction for the visitor to further browse your website.

The easy, natural flow of conversation

No one likes to talk to a robot. Their conversation with a conversational website should not feel like they are talking to a robot and that they need to remember certain phrases or lines for the website to perform their task. The way they talk on the website should be as close to natural speech as possible. The user should be able to use the website’s speech feature with everyday language as if they are talking to a real person. If your conversational chatbot needs to explain commands, then it is not conversational, and something is wrong with your design.

Personalization

If the above point is done well, what your conversational page will build is a personalized experience for the user. And personalization doesn’t mean that you welcome a repeat visitor with his name; but it means knowing your customer, his likes and dislikes and showing him information that is pertinent to his needs. The VUI used will help the conversational webpages to differentiate between new and old users, creating a user profile for the first-time visitor and storing relevant information. With more information, the better will be AI and VUI in personalizing the web experience for the user. Of course, as a developer, you first need to be specific about what type of information you will collect for the whole process to work.

Recognizing tone of voice

One of the biggest failures of the earliest VUI was not differentiating between accents, voices and tones of speaking. However, with the help of AI, your VUI can avoid this major drawback. As humans, we are trained to get information about a person just by hearing his or her voice, like gender, age, education, language proficiency, and more. We also pick up on subtle clues like when someone is agitated or pleased by the tone of the voice. The new VUI are being trained to mimic this human behaviour. It is also helping businesses to create a persona for the VUI to be used based on the profile of the visitors on their website.

Conclusion

The digital world is on the cusp of the next revolution and conversational websites powered by VUI and AI are going to play prominent roles in it. For that future, create the foundation today by developing a conversational website for your business.