“It’s 2020. Why is it still so complex to add a Voice Assistant to apps?”

‍This was the question that I was asked during an interaction with voice enthusiasts gathered in Bangalore.

General-purpose Voice Assistants have been the rage ever since Alexa burst into the scene in 2014. While Alexa and Google Assistant proved the value of voice as an interface to getting things done, most of the actual digital interactions are still happening with apps — mobile and web apps.

Since then, many brands have added Voice Assistants to their apps, but the process of adding them has remained quite complex. It requires specialized skills involving deep tech components like Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Text-To-Speech (TTS), and also requires marrying an existing visual design with the new conversational design paradigm. I have talked about the complexities in building custom In-App Voice Assistants in-depth in an earlier blog.

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This is 2021. Adding voice assistants shouldn’t be so difficult anymore.

We started Slang Labs to drastically simplify the process of adding In-App Voice Assistants. Over the past 3 years, we have worked with various brands, helping them build their own In-App Voice Assistants.

Today we are proud to present the fruit of that passion and the effort behind it.

Slang CONVA — The world’s first Voice Assistants as a Service platform

CONVA = COnversational iN-app Voice Assistants

Slang CONVA provides the easiest and fastest way to add In-App Voice Assistants to mobile and web apps. We have removed all the friction that exists in designing and building these Assistants. The underlying components of the platform were already being used by many leading brands in India and today we bring all that power to everyone, by making it available as an easy-to-use self-serve platform, for anyone who is looking to add an In-App Voice Assistant to their apps.

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Key innovations in Slang CONVA

It brings together 3 key innovations that matter to customers —

Ease of integration:

The self-serve platform, with a lightweight SDK, comes with a bunch of pre-built domain specific Voice Assistants, that can be easily integrated into apps of that domain. No NLP or complex conversational design knowledge required to get started. The platform is built to be consumed by Android and web developers and in a very low-code fashion.

Managed complexity

The platform provides the technological infrastructure for the entire voice stack. It manages all the complexities of adding a Voice Assistant, like conversational design, intuitive UI & UX components, multimodal support, and most importantly, training, maintaining, and continuously improving the ML models for each domain.

Simplified commercials

The platform also provides a very simple monthly pricing scheme called MSU (Monthly Slang Users), which provides a flat charge per unique user, and allows unlimited usage for that user.

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Slang CONVA Features

The Slang CONVA platform supports a plethora of features that work together to provide the best possible experience both to the developers integrating the Assistant as well as to the users consuming the Assistant via the host app.

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Capabilities enabled in your app via Slang CONVA

The Assistants that get integrated with the app, enable the following capabilities inside it. The Assistants are pre-trained to recognize all these journeys and works in tandem with the app to provide the best possible end-user experience.

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And here is a quick demo of the Assistant integrated into one of our customer apps.

Retail e-commerce specialist

Today we are launching the platform with support for Retail e-commerce apps. More domains will be added over time.

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The platform you can trust. And already trusted by many

The tech behind Slang CONVA is already being used by major brands like Udaan, BigBasket, Vyapar, Shine.com, P&G, Trainman, etc.

Now the same power is available to anyone from the Retail e-commerce domain today and for other domains very shortly.

If you are from the Retail domain, give our platform a go today. Sign up for an account at https://www.slanglabs.in and see the magic yourself.

If your brand specializes in a different domain or if you’re simply curious, just schedule a call with us.