Open-Sourcing Violet at Dreamforce

Building great voice experiences is hard — and we believe the fastest way to make it easier is to build in the open. At Dreamforce this year, we shared Violet with the wider developer community and talked through why we built a conversation-first framework rather than yet another intent-handling library.

Why open source

Voice interfaces are still young, and the patterns for building them well are still being discovered. By open-sourcing Violet, we hoped to do two things: give developers a head start with a framework that already encodes proven Voice UX patterns, and learn from the conversations the community builds with it.

What we showed

We walked through defining a conversation with Violet's HTML-inspired Conversation Flow language, injecting application logic into that flow, and testing the whole thing locally in a browser before deploying to Alexa. Seeing a multi-turn conversation come together in a few lines of script is what makes the approach click for most developers.

If you want to try it yourself, start with npm install violet-conversations --save and the documentation. We're looking forward to hearing what you build.