A voice assistant for home energy use

An energy company had an app that shows how much energy each home uses. It wanted to bring those features to a Google Assistant voice app: checking energy use by period, the bill and the cost, and getting things done by voice.

We joined the project through a consulting firm and handled the conversation design from start to finish.

The challenge

You don’t design an app and a conversation the same way. On a screen, options are in plain sight and people can read figures at their own pace. In a voice interface, you have to decide what to say first, how many usage or cost figures fit in one answer and how to ask for missing information without losing the person.

On top of that, the assistant didn’t just answer questions: it also completed tasks. That means confirming clearly what’s about to happen and planning for what to do when something goes wrong.

What we did

1. Feature audit. We reviewed everything the app did and decided what made sense to bring to voice, and how.
2. Personality. We defined how the assistant speaks: its tone, how it introduces itself and how it responds when it can’t help.
3. Conversation flows. We designed every conversation, from the simplest question to multi-step tasks.
4. Unhappy paths. We planned what the assistant does when someone doesn’t answer, corrects themselves, changes the subject or asks for something that isn’t available.
5. Sound design. We created the earcons, short sounds that accompany the voice and help people know where they are in the conversation.
6. Integration and testing. We worked with the engineering team on the integration and tested the assistant’s full behavior.

Results

The client got the complete design of the assistant, from its personality to its sounds, with its behavior tested alongside the engineering team.