Introduction
Please note: this guide is in beta mode. Just like new software, it will have bugs and limited features. We welcome bug reports and feature requests, but we also ask that you please be patient with us. This guide was created by a very small team as a side project, so it will take some time to mature.
VoiceFirst Launchpad is a wayfinding guide that helps orient you to the ever expanding field of voice-enabled technology and the rapidly growing VoiceFirst community. It's like a curated site-map of the VoiceFirst ecosystem.
This guide was created by members of the VoiceFirst community to help you gain the knowledge, skills and connections needed to become an active member of the VoiceFirst community. Every one of us was new to VoiceFirst at some point, and so we understand the significant effort it takes just to get a basic understanding of VoiceFirst concepts, platforms, resources, community, and more. We hope this guide helps make that process much easier.
Here are some tips to navigating around:
On the top of any page is a magnifying glass icon. Click on that to search this entire guide.
On the left is an outline of the entire guide. On mobile you will only see the hamburger menu icon and need to click it to see the outline. You can then drill down to get to another section/page.
On the right is a list of contents for the page you're on currently. On mobile you will only see the right-justified icon to the right of the page title, and will need to click it to see the full list.
On the bottom of each page are buttons to bring you to the next and previous page. These are useful if you want to read the whole guide, or a section of the guide, from beginning to end.
The term "Voice First" was coined by Brian Roemmele, but is also referred to as "Voice-First" and "VoiceFirst." The #VoiceFirst hashtag is the most popular hashtag within the community.
According to Brian, "the term 'Voice First' was invented to express a new direction in computing that takes advantage of the primary human API, the voice. Voice First interaction is an AI driven ambient system computer user interface that has two fundamental components: input and output. Voice First input and interaction via voice commands and conversation. Voice First output representations and conversations. This is an augmented audio system that can be tightly integrated screen displays but may not be necessary for most applications. The premise of Voice First is to liberate the user from the full attention (cognitive load and mechanical load) required by the screen first / keyboard first environment of the last computer age." For more details, see Brian's answer to "What does voice first mean?" on Quora.
In other words, devices are considered to be Voice-First when the primary interface between the user and the device is voice commands. Varieties of Voice-First include Voice-Only, Multimodal and Voice-Overlay. To learn more, click on the "VoiceFirst Lingo" link below.
The following resources were compiled to help you learn more about VoiceFirst concepts, devices, platforms, the community and more.
The following resources were compiled to help you learn more about building your own VoiceFirst apps.
