With attorneys working on a growing number of personal, mobile and even internet-of-things (IoT) devices, integration has become key feature for any legal technology in the market. But getting your app or software to operate on different platforms is rarely an easy endeavor.

For Tell Tali, a voice-powered time tracking management app launched on smart IoT speaker Amazon Alexa, integration was always a part of its long-term business goals. Buoyed by its first integration with practice management platform Clio, the company set its sights on something far more challenging: integrating with smart speaker Google Home and chat program Slack.

The integrations with both platforms took around five months and were officially announced in March 2018. Despite their relatively short development time, there were many kinks to work out. Merging a voice-powered program like Tell Tali with relatively new and constantly evolving smart speaker technology or with an instant message service which has little to no voice functionality at all presented the company with its fair share of technical and operational challenges.

In integrating with Google Home, for instance, Tell Tali had to work around the multiple updates the platform would release to further expand or hone its capabilities.

Matthew Volm, CEO and founder of Tell Tali, explained, “We could write code for the product one week and be going in one direction because we think that's what we'll need to do based on how [Google Home] is built.” But then the smart speaker “will roll out new features or functionality, and all of a sudden we realize the direction we are going isn't right, and we should actually kind of backtrack and go another direction because ultimately it will be more efficient and effective in the long run.”

Though updates can help expand the functionality of products like Google Home, they can also introduce new glitches or bugs that developers need to work around. “Even with things like account linking and stuff like that, they can be pulled down for a couple of days,” Volm noted.

Beyond the technical challenges, there also is the question of how to account for the different ways users will have to interact with Tell Tali on different platforms. With Amazon Alexa, “you can say, 'Alexa, open Tali,' and she'll interact with you,” Volm said. “On Google Home, however, you literally cannot say, 'Open Tali.' It won't do anything for you. There are different commands.”

While such a difference might strike some as “not that big of a deal,” he said, it makes it difficult for users to jump from one platform to another. “If you have users on both platforms and you're going from one to the other, we want as much consistency from an interaction standpoint as possible.”

But consistency isn't always possible in certain integrations. While Tell Tali was launched as a voice-focused application, for example, the company is looking beyond smart speakers with its move to integrate with Slack. Volm noted that integrating with Slack required the company to think more broadly about how users interact with its application.

With allowing users to “talk” to Tell Tali through instant messages in Slack, he said the application is “taking a completely conversational approach where we are going to have more back and forth with the user, so it's not just a one-sided conversation anymore.”

The integration, which will see Tell Tali both respond to queries and prompt users with time tracking reminders, may represent a hedge against the time it will take for voice-enabled technology become mainstream in law firm and business offices.

Aside from outstanding technical issues, there are cybersecurity and privacy concerns over the use of voice-enabled smart speakers that may be hindering its wider deployment.

Dillon Knowlton, product manager at ThinkSmart, told Legaltech News that customers of such technology are only “really going to be comfortable starting with relatively low-risk use cases until the technology is flushed out. You're certainly not going to give access to anyone to ask Alexa about confidential cases or files.”

ThinkSmart is itself looking at integration its workflow automation platform with Amazon's Alexa. And it is far from the only company doing so: Thomson Reuters, for example, has developed Workspace Assistant, an Alexa integration application for its Workspace and Elite 3E system.

While Volm believes “voice is definitely in this next wave and is going to be the next revolution” for legal, he also knows the technology behind it is still nascent. “We are still early,” he said comparing the voice-enabled technology space to where the mobile apps market “was seven years ago.”