City of Melbourne
See it in actionThe City of Melbourne partnered with VERSA, to become the first city council in Australia to create a voice experience. The ‘What’s on Melbourne’ Alexa Skill and Google Action deliver a selection of activities to its locals and visitors. It supports 6 million visitors and thousands of events every day.
Technology & Development
Existing APIs to deliver content via voice
The City of Melbourne was the first council in Australia to create an experience that integrated voice and their website. Melbourne has hundreds of events every single day on offer its residents and visitors. On the website, however, this choice can be almost overwhelming.
Our approach was to use City of Melbourne’s existing API’s. They deliver key data to users via the website, we simplified the content and API’s to make the experience quick and conversational via voice.
Strategy & UX
Essential info to plan your next outing
The strategy was built around user insights. What was the key information a user needs to be able to find out what was on and then go and experience it?
Simplicity is key in all our projects. We designed the skill to be Multimodal — delivering the key audio and visual information simultaneously. First curating a list of upcoming events, then displaying a photo and crucial information like date, time and location. The skill supports requests for in-depth information about an event to allow users to plan their journey and day.
Launch & Continuous Improvement
Testing voice as a channel
VERSA designed and built the initial experience as a lean ‘pilot’ program. This allows the City of Melbourne to understand the adoption of voice with its audience. It also allows the team to prepare their content for future conversational experiences.
By focussing on the free and featured events in the city, the skill shares the most popular and requested information to the user.
