Announcing the Export to Independence Contest
We are helping smart speaker developers bring their voice apps over to mobile with cash prizes and a donation to charity.
We are extremely excited to kick off the "Export to Independence" contest today! Over the course of the next month, we want to inspire and help developers build independent voice mobile apps that work like their Alexa or Google Assistant smart speaker apps.
Contest Details
The contest details are here in this post. Developers can register here. We will be awarding $5,000 in cash prizes to developers as well as donating $5,000 to the Southern Law Poverty Center on behalf of all contestants. Entries will be judged based on overall voice user experience and creativity by a panel of judges will be naming later this week. We have assembled some of the biggest names in the industry to judge, so we’re excited to tell you about them.
Importing Smart Speaker Models and On-Device NLU
The contest showcases two new features we are launching this week. The first is the ability to import interaction models from Alexa and Dialogflow to Spokestack. The only difference between a mobile phone and a smart speaker is the quality of the speaker and the ability to put it in your pocket. So if you've already built a smart speaker skill, you are more than halfway to building a mobile voice app.
After the smart speaker model is uploaded, Spokestack will train the model to run on mobile. That showcases our second new feature, on-device NLU for mobile. We support on-device NLU libraries for iOS and Android. Spokestack gives developers the ability to build app-specific NLU models for their apps that work like their smart speaker skills. With on-device NLU, conversations will be snappier because they do not need to call out to the cloud to complete the conversation. Also, the developer will have complete control over the interaction with the user. Welcome to independence!
To help developers get started, we have written a series of tutorials for Porting a Smart Speaker Voice App to Mobile. In this series, we use one of Alexa's tutorials to build skills to show how you can go from building a smart speaker app to a mobile voice app.
Between the tutorials and our design guide for voice apps, developers now have the tools to build the voice experience they dream of on mobile. We're excited to see what they do!
Can I see a demo of a mobile voice app?
Yes, you can! In case you missed it last week, Spokestack Studio is available on iOS so developers could see how Spokestack enables wakeword, NLU and TTS for mobile apps. Download it here.
If you have any questions or need help, please check out our community forum or email us.
Have a great week and good luck!
Mike