An immersive Alexa skill to support parents of young children with advice, tips, sounds, and music.

The client

A globally recognised brand with a rich heritage in creating toys and products for early childhood development, dedicated to inspiring imaginative play and fostering learning for over 90 years.

The challenge 

Bring Mattel’s expansive knowledge and research about early childhood development to the Alexa platform.

The outcome 

A content-packed Alexa skill to help new parents navigate the first few years of childhood.

Industries

Education and learning

Retail and e-commerce

Media and entertainment

Services

Discovery

Mattel approached us to explore how they could bring their wealth of knowledge, experience, and research to their key audiences through voice assistants for their Fisher-Price brand. As one of the world’s largest toy companies, they have decades of research on how young children develop and wanted to help young parents tap into this using voice technology.

Through a series of workshops, we delved into the content Mattel had and developed the idea of a voice skill that would provide parents with insights into their child’s development and also offer audio from Mattel’s huge back catalogue of media to soothe and entertain both parents and kids.

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Content

We broke the first five years of a child’s life into 20 stages, with 13 tips for each stage to give advice that would promote the child’s social, physical, cognitive, and sleep development. Fisher-Price also had content for parents-to-be, which resulted in 45 tips to help parents prepare for baby’s arrival.

Drawing from Mattel’s huge catalogue of songs, music and soothing sounds, we incorporated over 200 audio files into the skill which would offer parents playtime music, lullabies, sing-alongs, nature sounds and classical music pieces.

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Voiceover

From the outset we wanted to make sure the skill’s content was delivered in a warm, trusted, and reassuring way, and we weren’t confident that Alexa’s native synthetic voice would necessarily provide this for our target audience. Working with our audio production partners Big Mouth Audio, we selected a voice actor and recorded over 300 individual audio files for use within the skill.

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Results

Following a second round of testing with families, during which the updated skill received an enthusiastic thumbs up from parents, we launched just before Christmas 2021. Initially developed for the UK market, the skill was also designed to be able to be extended to international markets across Europe and North America.

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