“Hey Google, Open Adobe XD”: Test voice prototypes on Google Assistant devices

Today, we’re introducing a new way to design with voice with Adobe XD and Google Assistant, Google’s voice assistant technology. With our new integration with Google Assistant, you can export prototypes with voice interactions from Adobe XD and preview them on real devices with Google Assistant. Google Assistant is available on dozens of devices, including mobile phones, smart speakers, smart TVs, and so much more.

Designing for voice is becoming more and more critical for all experience designers. According to our recent survey of voice technology users in the U.S., 39 percent of respondents started using voice technology in the past year, and 77 percent indicated that they would increase their use of voice in the coming months, citing more frequent use since the beginning of 2020. Voice technology is often considered easy to use and can make experiences much more accessible, creating opportunities for designers to leverage voice as part of any user experience.

The new integration with Google Assistant helps you experience your designs firsthand, using voice commands to control the experience on a real device just like your users would. You can share these prototypes with stakeholders and clients to help them better understand your intent and experience your vision. Plus, by testing voice experiences on real devices, you can incorporate voice considerations earlier on in the design process, allowing you to gather feedback and improve your designs without going through development for every incremental change.

Using the Google Assistant integration

First, you’ll need to install the new Google Assistant Preview plugin for Adobe XD, available for free.

Using voice commands and speech playback, you can add voice features to your prototypes, whether you want to add voice features to a screen-based experience like a mobile app or design voice-only interactions. You can learn more about voice prototyping in Adobe XD in our help documentation.

Once you have a prototype that you want to test, you can export the prototype and interact with it on any Google Assistant device. In Prototype mode, select the prototype flow that you want to preview and run the Google Assistant Preview plugin. In the plugin, you’ll give your prototype an invocation name that you’ll use to open your prototype on a device with Google Assistant installed. Click “Export” and now your prototype will be pushed to Google Assistant.

From any Google Assistant device, simply say, “Hey Google, talk to Adobe XD.” Your device will then ask you to log in using your Creative Cloud account and enable you to interact with your Adobe XD prototypes from any device where your Google account is logged in. Then, using the invocation name you set earlier, you can open the prototype and interact with it on your Google Assistant device.

We are so excited to see all the different ways designers use this new integration to bring voice into more and more user experience designs. You can also test your prototypes on Amazon Alexa devices using the Amazon Alexa Preview plugin.