Voiceflow emerges as a revolutionary platform, transforming the way we interact with devices and services. This article delves into the world of Voiceflow, a tool that empowers individuals and businesses to harness the potential of voice-driven applications.

Voiceflow is a chatbot creation tool that lets you create, test, and implement voice chatbots. You can easily build your own voice chatbot and install it on Google Home and Amazon Alexa with a few clicks. So, should you build your chatbots with Voiceflow?

Let’s explore!

In this article you will know:

What is Voiceflow?
User Interface
Components of Voiceflow
User’s/Client
Messages
Channels
Integrations
Promotions
Pricing
Analytics
Templates
Client Assistance
Conclusions

What is Voiceflow?

Voiceflow is a cloud-based platform that empowers designers and developers to create voice applications without the need for extensive coding knowledge. It is designed to facilitate the creation of conversational interfaces for devices such as smart speakers, voice assistants, and chatbots. The platform provides a visual interface that enables users to design, prototype, and iterate on voice applications seamlessly.

You can design and prototype voice and chatbots with Voiceflow. Additionally, you can create your voice chatbot with Voiceflow and install it on Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. But after speaking with Voiceflow’s CEO, he would advise against doing this unless you are a large company, as it frequently needs programming to be done correctly.

At the moment, Voiceflow is more concerned with the design and prototyping of chatbots than with actually launching them. As a result, they don’t offer particular features like:

Live chat
Integrations with other systems, such as CRMs
Analytics

User Interface

You have a few options when creating your chatbot design in Voiceflow. These include:

Afterwards, Voiceflow’s visual flow builder offers an extremely tidy interface for creating chatbot flows:

Blocks make up the visual flow builder, and you can edit any block’s contents by simply clicking on it:

It is awesome that you can add speak variants as well. This implies that you can add more than one variation of a message, and Voiceflow will select one at random and send it to the user:

Your voice chatbot can be automatically tested within the Voiceflow interface after it has been created:

Thus, Voiceflow’s interface is generally very user-friendly, and setting up your voice chatbot is also very simple. Another benefit of their UI is that a support button is located in the right corner. You can contact their support team directly from the interface. incredibly helpful

The ease with which you can distribute your prototype to others for testing is another benefit of the interface:

This is a very useful feature if you work in a team! Despite having a nice-looking interface, the system frequently takes several minutes to load:

Until you remove the cookies from your browser, this will continue. Moreover, my chatbot frequently returns the following error when I update it and try to test it again:

These mistakes are frequent enough to make creating your voice chatbot effectively nearly impossible. I was unable to test updated versions of my chatbot because the errors prevented the chatbot from updating.

Components of Voice Flow

With Voiceflow, your chatbot can send four different types of content: text, audio, images, and cards. You can also add a background image to a card using Google Assistant, as it appears here:

The unfortunate thing is that Voiceflow does not support Galleries (Horizontal Lists) or vertical lists; however, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa do support these features.

Furthermore, I am aware that you can request authorization from Google Assistant in order to obtain a user’s location or email address (which is linked to their Google Account). Voiceflow does not offer these kinds of features, which could be very helpful in obtaining a Return-On-Investment for your voice chatbot. This is most likely a result of their increased attention to the design and prototype of chatbots rather than their actual launch.

Moreover, conditions can be incorporated into your chatbot flows to provide a customized experience:

Additionally, you have the option to utilize Components, which are reusable chatbot flows that you can apply at the conclusion of a discussion. For instance, you may inquire, “Is your question answered? ” at the conclusion of each discussion.”

Users/Client

Using the Capture element in Voiceflow, you can pose a question to a user and have their response automatically recorded in a custom field:

One small drawback is that not all of the users who interacted with your chatbot can be seen in Voiceflow itself, including their custom fields. This also makes the creation of user segments impossible.

Messages

It is not possible to send broadcasts or sequences with Voiceflow. This makes sense as well because the only channels they offer are Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, and you are unable to send broadcasts or sequences on those platforms.

Additionally, a chatbot that can handle multiple languages simultaneously can be created, though translating one is not that simple.

Channels

Integrations

It is unfortunate that Voiceflow does not offer live chat integration as this is the most crucial feature of any chatbot builder. Thankfully, they offer a direct integration that lets you add, retrieve, edit, and remove data from Google Sheets. Using Voiceflow’s API block, you can also generate, send, and receive data from other applications:

Promotions

Voiceflow’s marketing opportunities are somewhat restricted, which makes sense given that their primary focus is on Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa as channels.

Pricing

Voiceflow offers two free projects for personal use as part of their forever free plan. You can also start a Google Action, an Alexa Skill, and receive 5,000 messages per month with this plan. Their Pro plan, which costs $40 per editor per month, is the only option if you want more. Unlimited projects and 250,000 messages each month are included with this plan:

Analytics

One major flaw in Voiceflow is that it does not offer any analytics. It seems a little odd, in my opinion, that a tool that is primarily intended for prototyping lacks analytics. since user testing is a common practice when working on a prototype. Additionally, you could more easily improve your chatbot with analytics about these test users.

Templates

To help you get started with your chatbot, Voiceflow offers 22 templates. Regretfully, you are unable to make your own templates and distribute them to other people. Thankfully, you can easily reuse your chatbot elements and flows by making duplicates of them.

Client Assistance

Voiceflow offers comprehensive documentation and video tutorials to make using their platform simple. Additionally, they provide email and live chat customer support.

One of the key strengths of Voiceflow lies in its user-friendly design, making it accessible to both experienced developers and those new to voice application development. The visual interface allows users to design conversation flows by connecting various components, such as prompts, responses, and actions, through a drag-and-drop interface. This intuitive approach streamlines the development process and reduces the learning curve associated with voice application design.

So, should you build your chatbots with Voiceflow? It varies. Voiceflow is an excellent tool to use if your focus is solely on creating and testing chatbots. You can quickly create chatbot designs with their user-friendly interface and share them with others. However, I would only suggest using Voiceflow to create a full chatbot if you are a large enterprise, as it requires programming to make it function (and integrate it with other systems, like your CRM).

Voiceflow: A platform review 2023