Telekom: Voice Assistant

"Find me comedies with Jennifer Aniston."

Controlling MagentaTV using voice commands feels incredibly easy for users. For example, when they are browsing for the perfect series after work. However, taking conversational AI from prototype to go-live is a highly complex endeavor. That's why we are delighted to have taken part in creating uniquely German voice assistant for Deutsche Telekom.

"Switch to ZDF."
"Open Prime Video."
"Find me movies with Denzel Washington."
"Find me comedies with Jennifer Aniston."
"What's on TV today?"
"Play a summer playlist on YouTube."

MagentaTV is Telekom's TV streaming service

It brings the entire television experience into one central place. Users can watch their favorite TV channels, stream Disney+ or Netflix, or even peruse Telekom’s own streaming offering, the Megathek.

With the power of voice control, users can switch channels, open apps, navigate through content and much more. MagentaTV users particularly love the voice search function. They no longer need to tediously type in movie titles using the up and down buttons!

A one-click TV experience

MagentaTV users should be able to control their TV easily and naturally. That's where voice control and VUI.agency come into play. We were able to contribute and implement our vision of high-convenience TV navigation.

Numerous user tests beforehand showed a need for complex search queries like "Funny movies with Tom Hanks." This is a quick job for the natural-language understanding, but a big relief for TV watchers.

Users can intuitively control MagentaTV and seamlessly switch between voice control and button control. The assistant perfectly understands users' desires and quickly brings them to the desired content. Whether it's live TV or streaming, we ensure an unparalleled entertainment experience.

Our contribution to the project

User research

We started with extensive user research. We wanted to understand how users interact and speak with their TV. We interviewed Telekom customers and created a voice prototype, and by having users try out the prototype in different phases, we gained valuable insights for the development of the voice assistant.

Product development and multimodal design

TV is a multimodal product that engages multiple senses. The visual aspect is particularly prominent. For our product development, this meant focusing on multimodal design: in addition to the detailed design of voice use cases and providing voice data for training the AI, the question was: How do we represent the voice assistant on screen? We worked intensively with Deutsche Telekom on this aspect.

The result is a fantastic product that places users' needs at the center.