Our team of VUI designers, voice developers, and linguists collaborated closely with knowledge engineers, voice backend developers, and client developers at Swisscom to create this customized assistant. Throughout the project, we played a critical UX & Design role in developing all technical components, including the first Swiss ASR (automatic speech recognition) system that can handle multilingual input - in the context of TV entertainment.

Together with Swisscom, we designed a system that enhances the inclusivity and accessibility of Swisscom's content through voice, and established deployment and working processes that enable us to continuously deliver exceptional voice UX in a multimodal environment.

By working closely with Swisscom's team, we achieved an unprecedented level of collaboration, ensuring that our voice design and voice development deliverables aligned with Swisscom's brand values and consistently met their high standards.

In any conversation, non-verbal signals and tone of voice can significantly impact the acoustic charisma of an assistant persona. That's why our sound design team focuses on creating accessible and meaningful soundscapes for our voice projects.

With a team that comprises 80% linguists, we bring a wealth of expertise to voice development. Our phoneticians specialize in teaching standard and custom TTS (text-to-speech) for German, English, Italian, and French, ensuring that Swisscom's multilingual context has smooth and accurate pronunciation.

Utterance and prompt design are critical to achieving mutual understanding between Swiss users and the Swisscom Voice Assistant — in four different languages.

Our team collaborated with Swisscom's computational linguists and knowledge engineers to develop the first Swiss Voice Assistant using the Teneo platform. Teneo's hybrid NLU (natural language understanding) component, which combines linguistics and machine learning, was instrumental in addressing the significant challenge of correctly understanding various languages and dialects.

Our utterance design ensures that the Swisscom Voice Assistant comprehends German, English, French, and Italian inputs accurately, making it accessible to all Swisscom customers. In our prompt design, we prioritize maintaining the assistant persona's charisma across all languages while staying true to Swisscom's brand values.

The Swisscom Voice Assistant is accessible for conversations through two modes: far-field recognition via the integrated microphone array in the Swisscom Set-Top Box, activated by the wake-up-phrase 'Hey Swisscom,' and the familiar Push-To-Talk button and microphone on the remote control, which Swisscom customers already use for voice search.

Our goal is to create a premium, multimodal voice user experience that is both accessible and intuitive, integrating the most significant graphical user interface in people's homes: the TV. We believe that by prioritizing ease of use and accessibility, we can create a truly innovative voice assistant that transforms the way Swisscom customers interact with their TV Box.

We work closely with data analysts to measure anonymized user behavior and system performance. Using specific KPIs such as churn and success rates, among other metrics, we identify areas for optimization and continuously adapt and iterate our design and implementation.

By combining quantitative measurement with qualitative user testing and interviews, we gather valuable data to improve the Swisscom Voice Assistant continually. We recognize that the most critical feedback comes from Swisscom customers, and their insights are invaluable in shaping our development process.

Our commitment to challenging our design hypotheses and adapting to user needs ensures that we deliver a great user experience that consistently provides business value for our voice project.