Voice Assistant Conversational UX: A Working Checklist

Most voice assistant copy still reads like an obstacle course — apologetic, jargon-heavy, and too long to hold in memory over a phone call. This isn't a theory piece. It's the working checklist built from a usability analysis with product stakeholders during a live voice-channel rebuild, later folded into a heuristic evaluation framework for testing spoken interactions.

You'll get seven principles across tone, response design, and option navigability — each with real problematic-vs-fixed examples, not hypotheticals. Every section also includes a GenAI note: what changes, and what doesn't, when your assistant is speech-recognition-plus-LLM instead of a DTMF menu.

Use it as a working document during design reviews, not a read-once PDF.