Meredith Adds Latest Alexa Developer Features and Spanish to My Daily Mindset Voice App
Women’s lifestyle brand Meredith and voice app developer Skilled Creative have launched a Spanish version of the My Daily Mindset Alexa skill called Mi Afirmación del Día. Coming out just a couple of months after the English version debuted, it’s Meredith’s first bilingual skill. It takes advantage of some of the new Alexa developer features introduced by Amazon this summer, including Quick Links and Name-Free Interactions.
Voice Wellness
Mi Afirmación del Día and its English counterpart offer what Meredith calls an affirmation journey. Alexa guides users to focus on different aspects of healthy thoughts over 14 days, ending each day with a wellness tip and the option to get more content from Health by text message. The updated version runs the app in either Spanish or English, depending on the language used to start the skill. Telling Alexa, “Start My Daily Mindset,” will begin the English version while saying “Alexa, abre Mi Afirmación del Día” launches the Spanish variant, changing the visuals on a smart display as well as the spoken tongue. Meredith created My Daily Mindset partly because of data the company has collected showing how people’s mental health has suffered during the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis, especially among the Latino community.
“Our goals when we set out on creating My Daily Mindset was to first deliver an experience that offered a wellness solution, considering 40% of our readers have expressed experiencing burnout, and second to ensure that the product experience was truly inclusive and diverse,” Meredith senior manager of innovation Peachy Jean Retizos said in an email to Voicebot. “We’re proud that we’ve made a science-backed wellness experience that is also representative of diverse voices, and is accessible in multiple languages.”
This is the fifth Meredith voice app, part of the company’s growing interest in adding voice tech to the channels used to promote their brands, especially when it comes to health and wellness. In March, the company launched Real Simple Relax, a guided introduction to meditation from Meredith’s Real Simple brand. My Daily Mindset has quickly found success, growing 20% week-over-week, with a similar percentage opting to get the extra content, according to Meredith.
Alexa Ideas
Meredith and Skilled Creative have also incorporated some of Amazon’s newest tools into My Daily Mindset, taking advantage of the options introduced at Alexa Live over the summer. The name-free interaction (NFI) toolkit makes it easier to find the skill by letting users find it using keywords instead of needing the skill’s exact name. The AI infers what the user is looking for and takes an educated guess. Alexa can then ask follow-up questions if it’s still unsure. Meredith also augmented the skill with Quick Links, enabling anyone to create a link that can enable the skill with one click. The link can be embedded in a mobile app, ad, or just hyperlinked in an email. It streamlines enabling an Alexa skill and makes it easy to share it with other people. Both features likely contributed to the voice app’s rapid growth, especially in a year when people are limiting their travel outdoors due to the pandemic.
“This experience taps into a big need for everyone still in quarantine,” Skilled Creative CEO Brandon Kaplan told Voicebot. “Being able to launch a voice program that is both incredibly fun to produce and happens to be impactful makes it that much more rewarding. Attaching several key bells and whistles like quick links that make this, in my opinion, the best-produced wellness experience in the market.”
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