VOICE-USER INTERFACE

What are they?

Voice-user interfaces are virtual assistants that allow us to interact vocally with technology without having to use visual interfaces. This keeps our hands and eyes free; we can ask our assistant to provide information, play a song or complete tasks while we do something else.

Some examples of voice-user interfaces are Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google's Google Assistant, Telefónica's Aura or Microsoft's Cortana. These assistants are already included with some devices like mobile phones, tablets, cars or smart speakers (like Amazon Echo, Google Home, Movistar Home or Apple's HomePod).

Amazon Alexa

Our content is available through so-called “skills”, which can be added in two different ways:

Custom skills activation:

- Visit the Amazon webpage and look for the skill, or click on the button on our website. From there, you can activate whatever skill you want.

- You can also activate it directly from your device by saying:

Alexa, start "skill name" (for example: "Alexa, start Catalunya Ràdio")..

Adding flash briefings:

These are short blurbs that you can add to your device for Alexa to use as news sources.

- Go to the Amazon website and look for some of 3Cat's flash briefings, or click on one of the buttons on our webpage. From there, you can add the flash briefing.

-Start the Amazon Alexa app and go to Settings> Flash briefing> Add content. Use the search bar to find some of 3Cat's briefings (for example, "Titulars dels telenotícies"). Amazon will show you any results that match. Once you find a flash briefing that interests you, click Enable.

From then on, you can ask Alexa to read you our content with commands like:

"Alexa, give me the news"
"Alexa, what's today's news?"

If you have more than one news source activated, Alexa will read you the flash briefings in the order you added them. You can always edit this order by clicking on Settings> Flash briefing> Edit order, to make sure that you can first listen to the sources that interest you most.

Google Assistant

At the moment, our content is available through news briefings. These are short blurbs you can add to your device as news sources.

How to add news briefings:

- Open the Google Home app and click on Menu> More settings. From there, select Services and click on News. At the bottom of the list of your news sources, click on Add news sources.Google Assistant will show you a list where you can search for and add 3Cat's news briefings.

From then on, you'll be able to ask Google Assistant to read you our content with commands like:

"OK Google, play the news"
"OK Google, what's today's news?"

If you have more than one news source activated, Google Assistant will read the news briefings in the order you added them. You can always change this order by clicking on Menu> More settings> Services> News and clicking on Change order. Once there, you can change the order by dragging and dropping the different news sources.