Building A Mystery
Wanderword introduces Fabula, a no-code platform for creating robust interactive audio experiences
You come out at night;
that's when the energy comes.
The dark side's light,
and the vampires roam.
The number and quality of no-code or low-code tools, as well as the community built up around these tools, is an important measurement of the health of an ecosystem.
There are multiple of these tools that have positively impacted the growth of voice technology and conversational AI, from Alexa Skills Blueprints to Nuance Mix to Voiceflow to Cerence Studio to Voicify and others.
Fabula, a new tool from Wanderword, is a promising new addition to this constellation.
The tools that go on to be the most successful are the ones that will accommodate integration of third-party components.
For example, I should be able to create an interactive audio experience using any of these tools, and when I don’t want to use whatever default voices are included, I should be able to easily integrate third-party synthetic voices from a company like ReadSpeaker, or perhaps actual voiceovers from someone like Judy Fossum.
The need for these services to be open to any and all third-party players is what ultimately will make it difficult for one of the big tech juggernauts to win. As good as Alexa Skills Blueprints is, Amazon’s not going to be particularly inclined to work with the wide swath of third party providers as, say, a Voiceflow would.
Fabula, which is now in alpha stage and available by invitation only, was built with this type of wide-open framework in mind.
There’s a classic episode of The Office in which Michael Scott asks one of the accountants, Oscar, to explain something to him as if he were eight-years-old.
When Oscar’s simple explanation isn’t good enough and Michael remains confused, he says “OK, now explain it to me like I’m five.”
I think one of the untapped areas for these companies and no-code services is in creating easier and easier explanations on how these products work. If you think you’ve made it easy enough, you haven’t, and you need to make it even easier to understand. A constant iteration to simplify and refine.
This is something I think Wanderword does really well in their explainer video (which is not yet public but can still be viewed below). It’s unapologetically simple, making Fabula approachable for almost anyone.
Much of the attention in any area of emerging technology goes to the front, where the core innovations live and all of the press attention surfaces.
Almost no attention goes to the back, where you have educational tools, no-code solutions, community forums and other offerings which all serve to increasingly expand the circle of users and impact.
Fabula’s arrival is just another indication the market is moving the right way.