Wolf Paulus: The Engineering of Emotion

In our October Brown Bag, Wolf Paulus speaks to us about designing personalized customer experiences through emotions analytics. Registration is free for all interested through Eventbrite.

Tuesday, October 29 at 12 PM – 1 PM CDT
Register For This Event

Not only what, but how, a virtual assistant speaks will determine its success. We need to create a believable illusion that a bot concerns itself with the user’s situation. We need to turn engineers, designers, and content writers into emotion-aware wordsmiths who deeply care about every word and every pause, what to emphasize, and how to respond empathically. This talk explores and demonstrates possibilities of a more personalized, contextual and likeable customer engagement by using affective computing technologies and emotions analytics.

Wolf Paulus is an internationally experienced technologist and innovator, focusing on embedded and open-source technologies and voice and conversational user interfaces. He helps to accelerate the discovery and adoption of emerging technologies, which include Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, and Natural Language Understanding. Before joining Intuit, he was responsible for developing strategies and architecting solutions, to deliver a compelling mobile print experience for HP, and as a Distinguished Engineer at Motorola Mobility, where he worked on the Google Android platform. Wolf is appointed to the advisory committee for the Mobile App Development Certificate at the University of California, Irvine, and occasionally speaks at conferences and user groups on topics ranging from Embedded Technology to Emotional Prosody.

Upcoming Brown Bag Events:

Tue, Nov 5, 12 PM – 1PM CDT
Challenges of Implementing Voice Control for Space Applications

Bruce Balentine: Discoverability in Spoken User Interfaces

In our September Brown Bag, perennial favorite Bruce Balentine, Chief Scientist Emeritus, Enterprise Integration Group, speaks to us about “Discoverability in Spoken User Interfaces”. Registration is free for all interested through Eventbrite.

Tuesday, September 10 at 12 PM – 1 PM CDT
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Non-trivial user interfaces—those that require multiple turns to accomplish complex tasks—benefit when user and machine adapt to each other. Champions of voice claim that speech uniquely exhibits this plasticity. But it doesn’t unless the interface is designed to be discoverable. Discoverability requires systemic characteristics including trust, user-initiated backup moves, rewards for experimentation, and internal transparency. This session discusses specific design techniques that allow and encourage user exploration with low risk and a likely early payoff.

Bruce Balentine is a design consultant specializing in speech, audio, and multimodal user interfaces. In almost three decades of work with speech recognition and related speech technologies, Balentine has designed user interfaces for telecommunications, desktop multimedia, entertainment, language training, medical, in-vehicle, and home automation products. As Chief Scientist for EIG and head of EIG Labs, he leads EIG’s ongoing speech recognition usability R&D program, and — in addition to providing professional IVR consulting services — instructs at EIG workshops.

Upcoming Brown Bag Events:

Tue, Oct 22, 12 PM – 1 PM CDT
The Engineering of Emotion

Tue, Nov 5, 12 PM – 1PM CDT
Challenges of Implementing Voice Control for Space Applications

2019 Board Election Results

We’re pleased to announce that Kristie Goss (Concentrix), Shelley Moore (Verizon), Mark Smolensky (AT&T), and Helen Vanscoy (PTP) will be returning to the board, and we welcome our newest members Dawn Harpster (PTP) and Leslie Walker (Concentrix). These members will serve a two-year term.

Take our Survey

Hi VUI folks! We has finally moved the VUI Design Guidelines Wiki onto our own website and we are now looking at revamping the content. We’d love your feedback on the existing wiki and what you’d like to see in the future. The Wiki is here: Wiki and the survey is here: GoogleDocsSurvey
Thanks!

2019 Board Elections


The board of the Association for Conversational Interaction Design (ACIxD) is preparing for the annual election of new board members.

Five seats are up for re-election. The current members whose terms are complete are; Helen Vanscoy (PTP), Mark Smolensky (AT&T), Deborah Rapsinski, Kristie Goss (Concentrix), and Shelley Moore (Verizon). Members who have a year left to serve are; Crispin Reedy (Versay), Amy Goodwin (Verizon), and Jamey White (Concentrix).
Any number of candidates may run. You can nominate yourself or someone else (we definitely encourage self-nomination — if nominating someone else, please first make sure they’ve agreed to serve if elected).
If you would like to run for the board in this election, please email contact@acixd.org by Friday February 22nd. In that email, please include a brief statement about your candidacy, which we will publish to members in the election. Please limit statements to 500 words or less.
After the election, the board will determine its officers (President, Secretary, Treasurer, etc.). In terms of time commitment, the board meets by phone once every month, with additional meetings called as necessary (mostly around SpeechTek for preparation). Apart from this, the workload varies, depending on current ACIxD activities. Some weeks as little as 1 hour is required; at other times, 5 or more hours/week may be required.
Elections will be conducted via on-line ballot, starting March 4th, ending March 11th.

Candidates must be current voting members of ACIxD. If you’re not a member and want to participate in the election, just join at the Professional level. If you have any questions about your membership status for the election, just contact us at contact@acixd.org.
Thank you very much, and we look forward to hearing from you!

ACIxD 2019 Election Committee