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Alexaなどスマートスピーカーの話題中心に、Voiceflowの日本語情報を発信してます。たまにAWSやkubernetesなど。

〜スマートスピーカーやVoiceflowの記事は右メニューのカテゴリからどうぞ。〜

The first official #VFJUG Voiceflow event in Japan

Voiceflow Alexa

Yesterday, I held Voiceflow hands-on & workshop with #VFJUG (Voiceflow Japan User Group) at Tokyo. This was the first time for #VFJUG to hold an official event!

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The venue was "Pepper Atelier Akihabara", which is a show room of Japanese robot called "Pepper". It was an interesting experience because I had never tried to talk to him(or her? I'm not sure...) and found that he can speak more fluently than I expected. Always fun to try other VUI platforms.

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looks they are tired, lol.

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Anyway, let's talk about the hands-on session.

First, I introduced about #VFJUG. BTW, #VFJUG got over 100 members now! Yeah!

The theme of the hands-on is 'creating story with Voiceflow'. This time, I put more focus on story-building than technical matters such as how to use variabls or integrating with API, etc. Technical things is also fun, but it would be mainly for engineers. I wanted to appeal more fun side of creating a story, especially for people who had no programming experiences and skills. Using a lot of sounds and music, changing the voices for each character, interacting with users, those are not highly 'technical' skills but important for dramatic presentation.

The sample story for hands-on was based on very famous faily tail, 'Cinderella'.

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Begin with basic instruction of canvas and blocks.

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How to use sounds and music by uploading MP3s and Alexa skills kit sound libraries,

How to change voices with Polly and SSML.

How to capture users utterance and change stories via users' choice.

Using sounds and music is fun, but important to know those limitations.

Everyone, go for it!

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On the same day, Amazon Japan held a big event called 'Alexa Skill Learning Day Tokyo' and many VUI experts gathered there. Fortunately, some of them came to our event as supporting staffs. Thank you all!

a short break.

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After the break, move on to the work shop session. The work shop theme was how to make your story more intersting by Rie Motoki from Cybird Co., Ltd, she is one of the professional VUI experts in Japan and has created a lot of entertainment Alexa skills. Actually, this session was not related with Voiceflow itself, but very important for creating story-based skills. Now, I'd like to say thanks to Rie for writing the draft of this sample story for this event!

After all sessioos, introducing additional resources for learning Voiceflow, we had a rock-paper-scissors tournament for getting Voiceflow official T-shirts!!! Actually, we had so many T-shirts and all most everybody got one! lol. (Thanks! Emily from Voiceflow!!!)

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Finally, we got a photos! The pose we made means "V" of Voiceflow!

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Thanks to every participants, supporting staffs, Pepper Attrie Akihabara, and Voiceflow!!! That was an incredible event and so much fun!!!

See you in next events!!!