In this episode, Teri welcomes Clint McLean, the founder and VUI designer of Budgie, a Toronto-based startup voice app design studio.
Welcome, Clint!
Budgie develops and markets Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant voice apps. They have five skills/actions that are currently published with more in development. Clint leverages a variety of experiences from both his creative and business background to create high production value voice and multimodal experiences. Their most famous skill at Budgie so far is Detective X, a high-production choose-your-own-adventure-style game built into a Hollywood narrative, and Clint will talk all about it and so much more.
Journeying into Voice Technology
- When Alexa became available in Canada, he was in a place where he felt burnt out on most of his creative outlets, and so he got his first smart speaker immediately they were available and starting experimenting with voice apps.
- He realized the potential that it had and found it very exciting, but he didn’t know how to code, so he kept a notepad of voice tech ideas, and then started consuming every content he could get on voice technology.
- In 2019, the Alexa in Canada podcast featured Braden Ream from Voiceflow who explained that Voiceflow was a no-code alternative for building Alexa skills.
- Clint immediately signed up for Voiceflow and that’s how he was able to start creating voice apps.
- He started working on basic voice games and apps, and he initially made a game to learn about APIs, a sing song game to learn about capturing utterances, and an Easter egg like skill to help people learn about integrating audio files.
- He later on started taking on more ambitious projects.
Detective X
- It’s a high-production choose-your-own-adventure-style game built into a Hollywood narrative, and it’s all about detectives trying to stop a killer.
- With his background in audio production and storytelling, making interactive fiction seemed like a good fit for both his strengths and he was genuinely excited about it.
- He worked with voice actors and employed sound effects and sound tracks to create an immersive experience that was unlike anything else in the market.
- He tried watching a movie with his eyes closed and imagined what it would take to have such great audio in a movie that anyone listening to it without watching would understand and enjoy the plot. That’s the mindset he had when he started working on Detective X.
Creating Detective X
- He started with a basic storyline, the same way movie scripts are written. From there he started using the poly voices within Voiceflow to start constructing the dialogue and make up each scene.
- He voiced one of the characters himself and hired voice actors on Fiverr to voice the rest of the characters.
- He included a game saving functionality since not everyone has the time or patience to play the game straight through.
- Detective X was launched in all English speaking regions and is also available on Google Assistant.
- The game officially launched at the end of May on both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, and it just so happened that the Amazon Alexa team was hosting a gaming week on their Twitch channel at the same time, so Clint got them to play Detective X and the game got a lot of positive feedback.
In-Skill Purchases
- He has given a lot of thought to it and has even tried it out on some prototype versions, but he concluded that Detective X could easily be turned episodic with different cases, different mysteries to solve, and different killers. That would be a successful approach, and so in the long term he wants the initial case of the game to be free with future cases being in an ISP pay wall.
The Future
- He’s interested in collaborating with other developers and stakeholders in the voice technology industry while also continuing to work on his own projects.
- He also plans on expanding on the Detective X universe and experiment more on visuals and APL with the Echo Show.
List of resources mentioned in this episode
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