City of Melbourne and Versa Agency pilot voice experiences with launch of Alexa skill – What’s On

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VERSA-City-of-Melbourne.jpgCity of Melbourne has partnered with VERSA Agency to become the first Australian city to create a voice experience that allows residents and visitors to access an Alexa skill that shares the city’s featured and free events.

The City of Melbourne, interested in the potential of voice experiences, set out to create an Alexa skill to help people discover What’s On in the city. Joining forces with VERSA, Australia’s first enterprise-level voice experience agency, City of Melbourne became the first council in Australia to release a voice experience with the launch of What’s On Melbourne.

As one of most liveable cities in the world, Melbourne has hundreds of events on every single day which offers residents, workers and visitors an incredible amount of things to do. The City of Melbourne’s What’s On website, email newsletter and social media channels help people discover things to do in the City.

Designed to work with the newly-released Echo Spot, the Multimodal Skill, shares Melbourne’s curated list of upcoming events, displaying a photo and other crucial information — such as the date, time and location. The Skill delivers a seamless user experience, where users can hear details of the events and take the information with them via the Alexa companion app.

As part of City of Melbourne’s discovery approach to Voice, VERSA designed and built the initial Voice Experience to run as a lean ‘pilot’ program, enabling the What’s On team to not only understand the adoption of Voice with its intended audience, but to understand how to prepare their content for future conversational experiences.

Says Guy Munro, director of business at VERSA: “Being the first council within Australia to launch an Alexa Skill, shows just how the City of Melbourne pushes for innovation. We’re excited to see how this skill transforms over time as new features and updates are released.”

This Skill was designed with simplicity in mind. Focussing on the free and featured events in the city, the Skill, shares the most important information to the user, while making content creation simple for the What’s On team.

Click here to enable the skill in your Alexa app today.