Star Trek: Discovery Alexa Skill

CHALLENGE

CBS needed to promote their newest addition to the franchise, Star Trek: Discovery. The show was to stream exclusively on CBS: All Access so CBS needed to reach hard core Star Trek fans who were willing to pay an additional fee in order to watch.

SOLUTION

Rain created a Star Trek trivia skill which featured new trivia questions each week as well as behind-the-scenes interviews with cast and crew. The trivia tested a user's Star Trek knowledge about previous Star Trek series as well as asked questions from the previous week's episodes on Discovery. Users who wanted to score well needed watch the show.

The skill launched along with new Alexa-Star-Trek-themed easter eggs and received numerous press mentions including Geekwire, CNET and Geek.com.

MY CONTRIBUTIONS

Voice Experience | User Stories | User Flows | Script Writing

I served as the Voice Experience Designer on the project. I created the user flows, defined functionality, determined question cadence, and wrote scripts (responses and utterances).

USER FLOW AND SCRIPTING

My user flows and scripts took into account first time and repeat visitors. Additionally, I created different flows and responses for while the show was airing and for after the season was complete.

ACHIEVING PROPER PRONUNCIATION

Alexa will sound out words she isn't familiar with, but sometimes she doesn't get it quite right. In those situations, the word must be written phonetically. I researched the pronunciation of all the words in our trivia bank and made sure Alexa would pronounce them properly. Interestingly, I found that Alexa often needed coaching on the pronunciation of Vulcan words, but she handled Klingon quite well.

STATE MACHINE DIAGRAMS

I created technical diagrams to communicate with developers; the diagrams outline detailed interactions and logic for the skill.

THE SKILL IN ACTION