A lot can happen in a year, and 2020 is no exception. Looking back on the past twelve months, teams have gone remote, collaboration has been redefined, and creativity & design have taken on a new life with new constraints. Despite these changes, Voiceflow and its community has grown stronger – and that strength is what gets the team and I excited for what's to come in 2021 and beyond.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, it's important to look back – so with that, here are some of our favourite milestones for Voiceflow & its community in 2020.

2020 for Voiceflow by the numbers

• Grew from 20,000 to 55,000 Flowsters (users) across 100 countries
• Shipped 100+ new updates & features
• 200 million utterances hosted through Voiceflow's hosted runtime for Alexa and Google apps, up from 50 million last year
• The top 100 Flowsters by usage have now on average used VF 1.5x per day for the past two years straight

2020 Recap

JANUARY

Voiceflow attends Project Voice and wins Voice Tool of the Year 2020

In January, the Voiceflow team attended Project Voice in Tennessee and was proud to win Voice Tool of the Year 2020. While there, we were able to meet hundreds of fellow Flowsters at our Voiceflow social night.

FEBRUARY‍

Major release: Voiceflow's new editors, dialogue management, and interaction model manager

February was a big month for Voiceflow as we released a significant redesign for Editors, which included a new intents structure and dialogue management.

Our first team offsite

Voiceflow's team spread across 3 (now 5) countries, and for the first time, we flew the entire team to Toronto for our annual offsite.

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MARCH

Voiceflow wins Second (we'll get you next year, Descript) for the 2020 ProductHunt Audio & Voice award

Voiceflow was nominated for the Audio and Voice award on ProductHunt this year, coming second to Descript. Thanks to everyone who voted for us.

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APRIL

Major release: Voiceflow's new blocks redesign

In April, we ditched the "colorful blocks" that Voiceflow had become known for in favor of a new blocks system that allowed for more readable, professional designs.

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The COVID lockdown

The COVID lockdown came into full effect in April, as shown by the 100% growth in Alexa Skill usage as much of the world bunkered at home and wondered what their Alexas could do (below is our hosting data).

The Voiceflow team went fully remote at this time and have since shifted our in-person social nights to competitive pancake bake-offs and games of Among Us (not a great trust-building exercise).

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MAY

Voiceflow's new tutorial series launches

We launched our brand new tutorial series voiced by our very own Mark Ammendolia.

Fun fact — I've heard customers more than once mention Mark's tutorial voice is "dreamy," which is undoubtedly the effect we had hoped for when teaching context modelling concepts.

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JUNE

Introducing escalating reprompts, Prompt step, templates workspace, bulk import

June was the month of CxD enhancements as we introduced non-linear design (Prompt step) and escalating reprompts to help customers design with best practices even easier.

AUGUST

Launch of Canvas Markup

Canvas Markup is a game-changing feature that makes designs more readable and allows Voiceflow to be the single source of truth for Conversation Designs.

Launch of Commenting

Commenting allows for asynchronous collaboration amongst teammates, which in the age of COVID has proven incredibly helpful for our customers.

SEPTEMBER

Voiceflow featured during Alexa Live keynote

We partnered with Alexa to build a new APL-A integration, which we were fortunate to launch during the Alexa Live keynote alongside our friends at Creativity Inc.

Japanese Voiceflow fan community launches the "Voiceflow & VUI" fan guide

Certainly, a highlight for me this year was getting to "read" and review the Voiceflow & VUI book written entirely by our Japanese user group. Building a community and seeing the incredible connections made within it has truly been a humbling and inspiring experience. Seeing a group of creators come together to write a book on Voiceflow was something that I could never have predicted.

OCTOBER

Featured during Google Assistant Dev Day Keynote for Voiceflow's new Google integration

We announced our new Google Actions Console integration that we had built in partnership with Google during their Assistant Developer Day keynote.

Thanks to our partners at Google for inviting us!

Enterprise features including SSO, private cloud deployments, HIPAA compliant runtimes

Voiceflow Enterprise continues to grow as larger organizations centralize their conversational product teams to manage multiple channels. Because of this, we launched several key features to bolster our enterprise offering and are excited to keep building in 2021.

NOVEMBER‍

Launch of manual test controls, new navigation bar, and the .VF filetype

This past month we launched our new navbar, which emphasizes the ability to share and test rapidly. Further, we introduced new navigation controls making it easier to test, especially the Wizard of Oz test.

Lastly, we also launched the .VF file, which makes it easy to share your designs locally, similar to a .Sketch or .Fig file.

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Our focus for 2021

This year, we focused on two themes that guided our product decisions through 2020: enhancing team workflow and supporting new use cases through channel expansion. Thanks to the work we did this year to lay a technical foundation, we'll be able to continue focusing on these two areas with far more significant effect in 2021.

Throughout 2021 you can expect more team workflow focused features as we aim to make it easier for teams to create great conversations.

Voiceflow for chat, mobile, IVRs, custom assistants, and more

We started 2020, supporting only Alexa and Google with out-of-the-box integrations. However, our vision has always been the industry-standard tool for designing, prototyping, and ultimately launching the best conversational experiences.

After one full year of architecting, refactoring, and engineering— we completed the Voiceflow SDK, allowing customers (in beta) to connect Voiceflow to any conversational platform with any tech stack. In early-mid 2021 we plan to roll-out the Voiceflow's SDK to our entire userbase.

Some use cases that customers (in beta) have unlocked with our new SDK:

• Designing and prototyping in-car experiences with custom runtimes and integrations
• Designing complex IVR flows with a design-to-production pipeline using custom NLP/NLUs
• Prototyping a world-class mobile app with integrated voice assistant
• Prototyping conversational AI drive-thru experiences
• Building a custom assistant to support first responders
• Providing internal teams building a custom voice assistant a fast way to design, prototype, and launch native assistant functionality to production
• Extend Voiceflow's base functionality to meet custom requirements

One final thank you from 2020

For many, myself included, this has been the most challenging year of our lives for our physical and mental health. While this post featured the highlights, the Voiceflow team has certainly had our share of lowlights this year, both personally and professionally. 

If there's one thing that the 2020 rollercoaster taught us, it is to be thankful. Looking back on this year, I'm grateful for a team that challenges & supports the product and me every day and in awe of the incredible community of Voiceflow designers around the world. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't feel fortunate to work on a platform that impacts so many creatives in their everyday life. And for that, I want to thank you.

Thank you for building with us, have a safe & happy holiday season – we'll see you in 2021.‍

– Braden & the Voiceflow Team

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