How to Add Personality to Alexa Skills, Google Actions

I’ve checked out a lot of Alexa Skills and Google Actions over the past several months – and most of them have one major shortcoming. Can you guess what it is?

Major Shortcoming of Most Alexa Skills and Google Actions

The shortcoming I’m referring to is:

Most Alexa Skills and Google Actions are dry and lack personality.

How You Can Add Personality

So how can you add personality?

There are 4 major ways you can do this:

1. Add sound effects

Adding sound effects can add a lot of personality to your voice app. Check out this article on how to prepare MP3 sound effects for use in your voice app.

2. Add emotion to the voice

Speechcons can help you add a lot of emotion to the standard voice – check out this article on how to use speechcons to add emotion to your voice app.

3. Choose words carefully

Most developers end up using words that are functional rather than emotional. While functional is good (gets the job done), words that evoke the appropriate emotion will make your voice app really stand out.

4. Create a custom voice

You can also hire a voice talent (from sites such as Voice123.com and Voices.com) and create a custom voice for your voice app. While this is more expensive than the options above, this will help you give your voice app an entirely unique personality.

Select the Proper Personality

Now that you know how to add a personality to your voice app – here’s the next question:

What kind of personality should you give your Alexa Skill or Google Action?

This is a very important question and I recommend you choose this carefully. Check out this excellent post on creating a persona for your Alexa Skill, it has a detailed process for selecting the proper personality!

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I hope you found this article helpful. Post a comment if you have any questions!