Mother Nature

As part of my role as Creative Technologist at Beyond, I wanted to explore new opportunities in Voice and deepen my knowledge of the various API’s, in particular Dialogflow and how it could be used to create a Google Action. We also wanted to create something for Earth Day, so this provided an interesting opportunity to tie these two together.

We initially ran some Brainstorming/Creative Workshops where we came up with many different ideas using a variety of different techniques, before whittling these down through a process of elimination and finally voting on our favourite.

The idea was simple, it was a voice app where you would ask to speak to Mother Nature and in return she would provide you with either facts about the earth or set you challenges which would help you do your part in protecting the planet. The challenges would range from easy (use a bamboo straw for a day) to difficult (don’t use any plastic for a week) and there was also the option of a quirky/humorous challenge, which could involve you not wearing clothes for a week to reduce your water usage from needing to wash them. Our content team kindly wrote around 30 facts and 20 challenges for each option to ensure there was no obvious repetition.

Overall I found Dialogflow really intuitive to use and powerful when combined with Firebase Cloud Functions to handle the more complex conditional logic. This project has since been picked up by our San Francisco Office and rebranded to be called ‘Future Planet’. It went on to win a Davey Award.

My Role

• Running Creative Workshop/Brainstorming Sessions
• Researching
• Developer