Sometimes communicating via text is not possible when your hands and eyes are not free to reach your mobile device.
This is something I often experienced while at the gym and had missed a few important messages. To find out if this was a common pain point, I sent a survey to our user community. After receiving a significant number of responses sharing similar experiences, I pitched an initiative to address this challenge and was granted engineering resources and 2 weeks to deliver an MVP.Â
Goal
Stay on top of your messages with Cortana from the people you care about when your device is out of reach.Â
In turn, allow Cortana to intercept incoming SMS and app notifications (defaulted by communication type apps or set by the user), ask if the message should be read out loud and read it through a multi turn voice experience.Â
Process
Everything started by researching existing solutions, user feedback on the topic (G+ surveys, informal interviews, etc.) and getting together with my dev and chat about available services and dependencies to make my vague idea of what I thought it should happen.Â
After validating that this is a real "people problem" and there's an opportunity to help them by using Cortana's platform, I began the drafting out the user flow for this primarily voice interaction experience.
After validating that this is a real "people problem" and there's an opportunity to help them by using Cortana's platform, I began the drafting out the user flow for this primarily voice interaction experience.
MVP shipped to our Cortana App Google+ Community
Outcomes
The Beta build initial response was very positive from the Google+ community. I've stumbled on a few technical limitations (e.g. unable to read all messages from notification center) and reverted back to reading only SMS for v1. The feature has shipped to market and I'm regularly keep track on the metrics and working towards v2.
