Pytanie Dnia
Pytanie Dnia [Daily Quiz] is by far one of the most popular games available on Google Assistant in Poland with over 50 thousand unique monthly users and a staggering retention rate of 15 thousand users per week. Why? The app does a great job in keeping users engaged by asking a randomly selected question every day about any topic, from history or science to beauty and entertainment.
Timeline: The project lasted approximately 1 month and went live on July, 24th 2019.
How does it work?
All it takes to play the game is to speak out loud the following words to your Google Assistant: “Hey Google, Let’s Play a game” or “Hey Google, talk to Pytanie Dnia“.
There are two types of questions: a general daily question and a bonus question. The basic question is a randomly selected one, while the bonus question, if available as part of a promo campaign, pops up immediately after the basic question gets answered.
Challenge
During the development process, we’ve come across a few challenges.
- To become experts in Google Assistant – we were the new kid on the block of voice assistants and creating the game was one big experiment to begin with. It was our first big Google Assistant project and we didn’t know how the Polish audience would actually respond to the game. Would people like it? We had no clue.
- To collect constructive feedback – we didn’t really have any support from Google, plus Google Assistant doesn’t allow you to respond to negative yet valuable comments posted by users, we had to think of different ways of collecting feedback from our early adopters. So we reached out to a few Google Assistant related Facebook groups and invited the members to test our beta and alpha versions. Thanks to building a Facebook’s community around the game, we were able to gather plenty of feedback and act upon it.
- To entertain, engage and educate – the goal was to create a game that would not only entertain, but also engage users from the very start and educate them through its simple mechanics. At the same time, we had to find the right balance between “too easy” and “too difficult” for first-time Google Assistant users.
- To monetize the game – right from the start, we looked for ways in which we could monetize our product, create mechanisms for promoting our next actions and voice applications.
Approach
When the Google Assistant was launched in Poland, we were still a small team, but with all the right assets and skills on board. We had all it takes to identify the kind of actions we could create for Google Assistant.
We’ve run a few tests to see how people play, which questions keep them engaged and which don’t. We had questions about Pac-Man, Easter or even about the comeback of Robert Kubica (Polish racing driver). After all, the Question of the Day was our final bet.
Game structure
The plan was to display one question a day, 4 answer options and an explanation of the correct answer. At the same time, we didn’t want to overwhelm people with too much information on the screen, so we decided to add a button that would take them to Wikipedia or other sources for more information.
A bit of entertainment
To make the game more fun and up-to-date, we have introduced bonus questions that ask about your opinion about world-related aspects. Bonus questions run as partf of time bound campaigns. A bonus question can also be a sponsored question with product placement that redirects you to the sponsor’s website. For example, we had a question featuring Glov cosmetics.
Our team
At first, there were only 3 of us on the team; each with a different background and experience. Later on, the team grew by several other members who built the database of questions. We developed a content management system (Voice CMS) that is used and developed for other voice projects based on the changing scope of content.
Our processes
We are a strong technical team with lots of development experience. We work in the agile-scrum method. This allows us to keep up with the changing requirements in the area of conversational AI which are being constantly influenced by the ever-evolving user needs.
That’s also why we built the game step by step to carefully follow user behaviors based on observations. On top of that, we knew that introducing too many features at once in an undiscovered market could have cost us too much.
Nevertheless, at one point we came to a conclusion that even the craziest idea is sometimes worth giving a shot. While we couldn’t predict the users’ response, we knew that we had everything it takes to carry out great and valuable voice application projects from ideas through conversation projects to programming and integration activities.
Business Benefits
The Pytanie Dnia (Daily Quiz) soon turned out to be the most popular game available on the Polish Google Assistant action marketplace with over 50 thousand unique monthly users. The project gave us plenty of insights, such as:
- Access to unpublished data – we have gained access to data that no other business publishes or had access to.
- Insights for our business partners – we can show our business partners what works on the Polish assistant and what doesn’t.
- In-app promos – the game allowed us to conduct opinion surveys and then promote our partners their services or products, or even their own voice actions on the Google Assistant.
End-user Benefits
- Education – based on our observations, we can tell that users often hit the “Learn more” button which leads us to believe that people are curious about certain answers and seek information.
- Fun Facts – we introduced this additional feature based on users’ feedback. Those are available to the users once they answered the daily question and want to interact with the action even more.
- Ability to influence the game’s development – people have a real impact on how we develop the game.
Brands that were featured in the Pytanie Dnia (Question of the Day) as part of the campaign:
Centrum Ratownictwa, Glov, Lasy Bieszczadzkie, AZS UMCS Lublin, Newonce, KryptoBot, Nadleśnictwo Stuposiany, Lasy Państwowe, Bolesławiec City Center, Podcast Zawodowcy, Helion, Miasto Lublin, HearMe.ai, VoiceFest.
