Skip to main content

Swisscom Voice Assistant

Swisscom Voice Assistant

Scroll to content

Swisscom Voice Assistant

Swisscom's Voice Assistant is revolutionizing the telco industry for Swiss customers.

With advanced multilingual capabilities, it stands out as the most sophisticated voice assistant available on TV boxes — able to comprehend Swiss German dialects whilst also speaking German, English, French, and Italian.

  1. Hey Swisscom, brauche ich heute einen Regenschirm in Zürich?
  2. Hey Swisscom, turn up the volume.
  3. Hey Swisscom, voglio ascoltare Rihanna su Spotify.
  4. Hey Swisscom, allume mon lampadaire dans le salon.
  5. Hey Swisscom, ufä sänder SRF 1 wägslu.

Hey Swisscom, what languages do you listen for

The Swisscom voice assistant was our quickest project yet, delivering a complex, multilingual assistant with four design versions for each language in just ten months.

A new dimension of controlling your TV

Say goodbye to the tedious task of typing 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone' into your TV remote when you're in Switzerland. Thanks to our collaboration with Swisscom, you can simply speak the name of the movie into your Swisscom TV Box.

Our team of linguists and voice experts worked alongside Swisscom to create a custom-built multimodal assistant that is uniquely tailored for the Swisscom TV Box. By developing an independent voice assistant for Swisscom, we were able to infuse the assistant with a distinctive brand personality and an intuitive conversational flow that enhances the entire brand-user interaction.

Hey Swisscom, let's see you in action

The secret ingredient to a successful voice project

"I worked extensively with the VUI.Agency (today known as Ideabay.AI) past several years in my role as Product Manager Voice and had nothing but good experiences. They are bright, innovative, agile, and dependable. 

With an energetic approach, they have consistently achieved and often exceeded our goals. VUI is a key player in building voice designs, multimodal user experience, and dialogues for custom Swisscom Voice Assistant. 

Throughout engagement with Swisscom, they consistently display a remarkable ability to cope in high-stress situations and thrive in them. During the project in 2019, when notified of a shortened deadline, they managed voice design topics with confidence, despite the time constraints. And in recent months, their efficiency procedures and know-how significantly strengthened our overall Voice Assistant product results. They work hard and will spend the time necessary to ensure the quality of every single detail. We are grateful to have them on our team."

Kategorien_Logos_2021_30092021_Conversational-g_bearb

Best of Swiss Apps 2021

Swisscom Voice Assistant wins gold at Best of Swiss Apps 2021 in the Conversational UI category.

Discover more
1.5million_factbox_pfade

Swisscom TV customers use the voice assistant 

Swiss-on-location

Swiss office in Zurich

With our Swiss office in Zurich, we remain close to our current and future customers and provide local services and conversational UX expertise to the Swiss market.

Discover more

From function to person: why persona design is an integral part of voice assistants.

  • #VUI Design
Discover blog article

A few highlights of the project

Voice Development and Voice Design

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.

Sound Design and Phonetics

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 Design and Prompt Design

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.

Voice UX

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.

Voice Monitoring & Analytics

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.