The Future is Spoken presents Susan and Scot Westwater as this week's guest. 

Susan and Scot Westwater are the husband-and-wife co-founders of Pragmatic Digital where they advise the world's most innovative brands that want to capitalize on the incredible opportunity Voice represents. Through their consultancy, Susan and Scot help clients solve their marketing and customer experiences problems using customer-centric approaches to plan and create useful and usable Voice experiences for their audiences. 

They have presented and authored several talks, workshops, articles, and ebooks focused on the role Voice technology plays in marketing and business strategy. Together, they authored the book Voice Strategy: Creating Useful and Usable Voice Experiences and are working on a second book titled Voice Marketing which will be released in Spring 2022. 

Susan and Scot are also co-founders of Voice Masters, an online education program designed to teach innovative business teams about Voice and Voice strategy and ambassadors for the Open Voice Network and instructors for the Marketing AI Institute AI Academy. They both were recognized in Voicebot's Top 68 Leaders in Voice 2020, and Scot was recently included in Sound Hound's "Top 40 Voice AI Influencers to Follow on Twitter." 

Starting with their own experiences, they end up discussing voice design strategy for everyone. 

Tune in Now!

Conversation Highlights:

• [00:02:28]: Learn how Susan's experience from content and Scot's experience from product design background helped them start a pragmatic digital voice strategy company.
•  [00:05:05]: What does voice strategy mean, and why is it important? 
• [00:07:17]: Why is it important to balance the user needs and business needs to design better Voice strategies 
• [00:11:44]: Voice strategy involves thinking about the use case itself, like where Voice fit into the overall digital strategy to think about how even to convince the stakeholders and ROI of the investment. 
• [00:16:03]: Dont rush; adopt a crawl, walk, run approach to designing Voice products
• [00:22:45]: Testing is iterative
• [00:23:23]: Data is the king to design strategies
• [00:33:49]: Build vs buy strategy and which is better?
• [00:42:42]: Marketing is not a four-letter word. Involve them in your process early on
• [00:53:50]: Suggestions for aspiring conversation designers

Susan and Scot's book 

Voice Strategy: Creating Useful and Usable Voice Experiences  - www.voicestrategybook.com 

Voice Masters - www.voicemasters.ai 

Open Voice Network – Voice assistance worthy of user trust. https://openvoicenetwork.org/ 

Other Books: 

Designing Voice User Interfaces: Principles of Conversations Experiences  - Cathy Pearl 

How to Make Sense of Any Mess - Abby Covert 

The Content Strategy Toolkit  - Meghan Casey 

Audio Branding: Using Sound to Build Your Brand - Laurence Minsky and Colleen Fahey 

Learn more about Scot at

● LinkedIn 

Learn more about Susan at

● LinkedIn  

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Follow Shyamala Prayaga at @sprayaga