Translated from 日本語 • View original Hello, this is Aimi Nakajima.
The Alexa skill designed and developed by ISAO has been released!
"You can buy vegetables at Alexa" Japan's first skill
VEGERY is a skill that allows you to order organic vegetables from Miyazaki Prefecture. It was planned and developed by ISAO in collaboration with Veggie Farm Co., Ltd.
The project began to propose a new UX centered on home usage scenarios where Amazon Echo is placed in the kitchen, especially devices with Echo Show and Echo Spot screens.
Monetization with Alexa Skills
Currently, there are two ways to monetize with Alexa skills.
- In-skill purchases that allow digital content to be sold
- Amazon Pay for the sale of physical products and tickets
This time it's the latter Amazon Pay compatible skill. In other words, Alexa can be integrated with e-commerce site functions.
What is VEGERY
Veggie Farm is headquartered in Aya-cho, Miyazaki Prefecture, and produces and distributes agricultural products. "VEGERY", operated by the parent company VegeoVejico Co., Ltd., operates a fresh food delivery service app centered on organic vegetables and fruits from Kyushu. Vegery Farm mainly produces and distributes vegetables for "VEGERY". Vegio Vejico also has physical stores in Nezu, Shibuya, Tokyo.
I myself am a vegetable fan of VEGERY, and I can purchase tomatoes and fresh eggplants with surprisingly high sugar content made by farmers in Miyazaki Prefecture through VEGERY.
How the VEGERY Alexa Skill Was Born
Now, I would like to talk about how I created the skill and got it to release.
The target is VoiceUI Show. Anyway, for a short time!
I wanted to release it in conjunction with the VoiceUI Show 2019 Spring on Friday, May 31st, but due to various circumstances, we started working on it after GW. VUI design, development, application... I don't have time anyway.
Normally, it takes days to apply to Amazon⇒ receive certification feedback⇒ skill modification⇒ reapply, so the total number of days spent on VUI design, UI production for multimodal, and actual development is about 10 business days in total.
By the way, our company has a compact two-person system: VUI designer: Nakajima and engineer: Torii.
Both of them were also working on other projects, so they couldn't make it in time with the waterfall type, so they started in parallel.
Thinking about the Voice User Interface (VUI)
What you need for Amazon Pay support skills
The core function of this skill is to "purchase products".
The VUI happy path (the smoothest success story) is not difficult, but there are all kinds of patterns that must be considered.
By the way, Happy Pass has different assumptions for first-time users and repeat users. For those who want to know the product name in detail, we asked them to listen to the product description with "Tell me in detail", and we thought it would be better to have a VUI that allows repeat customers to go directly to the product details.
Roughly written, it looks like this. Pink is the user, blue is Alexa. The red line is the happy pass of the repeater, and the blue line is the first happy path branch.
In addition to the normal purchase flow, there are many utterances and error responses unique to Amazon Pay compatible skills, and I researched and referenced various other skills that have already been released.
It is also necessary to prepare flows and dialogues that correspond to these.
- Restart the skill with the item left in the cart to see if you want to proceed with the purchase
- Voice shopping is disabled in the user's Alexa settings
- The user's Alexa settings turn on the 4-digit verification code and emit the wrong code
- Amazon Pay permissions are off in the Skill Store
- When a user wants to change their shipping address
- If the user wants to cancel or refund
What is the ideal VUI for important decisions?
Basically, in VUI design, we try to provide users with human-like interactions with Alexa as much as possible. The job of a VUI designer is also to make Alexa a natural voice assistant that makes you feel like a human rather than a machine. At the same time, it is necessary to respond to all the variations of the words uttered by the user.
For example:
Say yes if you want to move on or no if you want to start over.
It feels like an IVR (automated response system) rather than a VUI, so it's not a human-like interaction.
However, implementing EC functions means that even if there is an unexpected "false positive, it will cause you to purchase an unintended product".
For critical branches, we believe that we need to narrow down the intents we accept to prevent mistakes from occurring.
Therefore, the final purchase confirmation was as follows. You can really buy it, right? This is a confirmation.
Confirmation of your order. One smoothie set will be paid to Veggie Farm for 3,780 yen including tax. Is it okay to ship to ◯◯? Answer yes or no. Say yes and the payment will be completed.
Ideas for Using Proper Nouns in Call Names
Alexa often doesn't say proper nouns in the same intonation as you want them to. As expected, VEGERY also needed to be devised to make it say "vegery" with the correct intonation.
Before Correction
[audio mp3="/uploads/Vegery-Before.mp3"][/audio]
After Correction
[audio mp3="/uploads/Vegery-After.mp3"][/audio]
Do you see the subtle difference?
As a result of trial and error with all kinds of strings, the best thing was to change "Veggie" to hiragana and "Lee" to "LY"! I don't know why it is a text, but I write it as follows.
This is Miyazaki Vegetable's Beji LY.
Alexa side, what you need other than VUI
I think the concern is not only how to make people buy products with skills, but also how the seller understands sales.
Amazon Seller Central is also required to have a company registration and management screen for selling on Amazon, and to sell products with Alexa.
There is also a review period here, so it is safe to register and approve the seller in advance. After that, by linking Alexa's skill ID, you can finally use the Amazon Pay integration.
By developing the backend, it is possible to expand the dashboard to receive an email when a product sells, or to visualize the sales status.
Lead Time to Submission and Publication
Calculating backwards from the event on May 31st, it is assumed that there will be 2-3 applications and amendments. From past experience, I thought I would be in time because I would receive certification feedback the next business day, but it was sweet! Since it supports Pay, it seems that there will be more confirmation flows than usual.
In the end, it took 7 business days to receive public notification after pressing the third application button.
At the VoiceUI Show, it was finally unveiled in advance, but at AWS Summit Tokyo from June 12th, we were relieved to be able to proudly show off the skill that was released yesterday!
Conclusion
- VUI that is inflexible for critical speeches, such as money involved!
- Amazon Pay compatible skills are a long process, so let's develop and apply with plenty of time to spare!
- Don't forget that you need to register as a merchant in addition to Alexa!
What's Coming
VEGERY skills were clear from the beginning that they wanted to realize, so the design sprint advocated in ISAO's VUI planning process I didn't take it in, and suddenly started VUI design.
The release was quite short, but there are actually features that I gave up due to schedule and man-hours, and there are flows that I want to modify. We are still working on the next update.
The release of skills is only the starting line. I hope that by turning PDCA with the aim of skills that people will want to continue using continuously, we can contribute to improving the overall quality of Alexa skills.
I would be happy if you could use it and let me know your requests and impressions.
If you are interested in developing Alexa skills, please contact us at any time. ISAO has been recognized as an Amazon Alexa Skill Development Agency Program!
Thank you for reading to the end!