Hello Everyone,

Brown Bags are back and we have several lined up.  We hope you can join us!

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Modeling Conversation for Chatbots with Mike McTear

The major intelligent agent platforms have converged on terminology involving intent identification and entity extraction, yet use different conversational models to describe behavior. Learn how these conversational models differ and which go beyond hard-coded conversation flows of “happy path” dialogues to model conversational phenomena such as follow-up questions, changes of topic, out-of-scope utterances, and other types of edge case. What are the desiderata for intelligent conversational agents?

Here’s the Eventbrite Link:  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/modeling-conversation-for-chatbots-tickets-45444298119?aff=ebapi

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Tue, June 5, 2018 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM CDT

Integrating Speech with Intelligent Services with Dr. Deborah Dahl

We are currently experiencing an explosion of sophisticated, cloud-based intelligent services. There are several well-known speech and natural language services, but other cognitive technologies are fast becoming available as cloud services. These include face recognition, emotion recognition, translation, and gesture recognition. This talk describes the available services, discusses how to integrate them with speech technologies, and reviews a number of ideas for new applications based on the combination of speech with other intelligent services.

Here’s the Eventbrite Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/integrating-speech-with-intelligent-services-tickets-45351046200

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Tue, July 10, 2018 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM CDT

Redefining the Role of the IVR (Is It Time To Toss Yours Out?) with David Attwater

We look at how digital transformation is affecting call centers and how speech technology is helping to meet the new needs that are emerging. We cover key issues such as the following: Who still calls enterprises and why? Is self-service in the IVR going away and if not, why not? Why are greater and greater demands being placed on natural language in the IVR?

Here’s the Eventbrite Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/redefining-the-role-of-the-ivr-is-it-time-to-toss-yours-out-tickets-45453235852

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Tue, August 7, 2018 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM CDT

What Makes a Customer Experience Designer? with Kristie Flenord

Finding the perfect fit for an open position is not always easy. We touch on suggested educational backgrounds, as well as sample job positions to help employers and interviewees alike fill a customer experience designer position. This is an interactive session where feedback from the audience is welcome, so come prepared to participate!

Here’s the Eventbrite Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/what-makes-a-customer-experience-designer-tickets-45453555809

The AVIxD Open Roundtable Series is an unscripted virtual forum for voice interaction design practitioners to get together and discuss topics of relevance to voice interaction design, such a best practices and industry trends.  Since voice interaction design is a rapidly changing field and voice designers may be the only one of their kind in their organization, the Open Roundtable offers a unique forum for designers to meet up and discuss current topics, as chosen by a subject matter expert panel.  Each Round Table will consist of  45 minutes discussion of the chosen topic, followed by 15 minutes of Q&A. 

November – Adjusting the Output of Text to Speech Voices

October – Tuning:  Convincing Clients it is Excellent

September – Better Usability Reports

August – Hiring / Training discussion  (follow up of the brown bag)

July – User Research Tools – card sorts, walk throughs, tree sorts

June – VUI Design Tools and Design Deliverables

To register for any of the AVIxD Open Roundtable series, go to our EventBrite page at:

https://www.eventbrite.com/o/association-for-voice-interaction-design-avixd-7930767466
There is no fee for attending but please support AVIxD by joining us today!  Visit http://avixd.org/membership/ to find out more.

Another great meeting in the history books.  Here are the notes. 

Please contact us at contact@avixd.org if you have any questions or you would like to join us for some of the upcoming efforts.

AVIxD Annual Meeting

April 4, 2018 – SpeechTEK

Note: See presentation on SlideShare at: https://bit.ly/2GNhvxz

• We need YOU!  Looking for more involved people at all levels
  • Many hands make light work!
• Next Meeting: AVIxD Virtual Membership Summit – May 4th, 2018, Noon Central time.
  • Topics:
    • Increasing AVIxD membership – growing the pipeline from “occasional member” to “involved member” to “board.”
    • Projects
    • Open forum for discussion

Challenge from Jim Larson: He would like to see AVIxD do something on:

• Guidelines for designing for Multi-Modal, i.e. Alexa Show and similar devices
• Job description for VUI designers.
  • We already have something of a start on that with the presentation today at 4:30 pm: AVIxD presents: What Makes a Customer Experience Designer

Group discussion:  Difficulty of hiring designers

• Some designers have “pompous” or difficult attitude
• People with pure usability background may be more humble
• Is knowledge of a specific tool a job requirement?  Probably not
• What about people coming from a computational linguistics / NL background?  Could be a good fit
• What about outreach to STC (Society for Technical Communication) chapters?  This could be a good source of memberships / interested people

Discussion about Tools

• Convergys has Pathmaker tool which is open sourced
• Other people are still using a variety of tools

Virtual meetings

• Group seemed very open to the idea of having virtual members meetings which would be like Brown Bags but instead of having a speaker we would have a variety of topics like a round table.
• Since so many of us are the only ones in our organization it is important to get that sharing.

Outreach to Chatbot companies

• Bot part works well, how to also use them to support IVR?

Idea for AVIxD website – Collect links to VUI educational resources other places on the web – Need a bit of a web refresh

Discussion topic – “Voice” vs. “Conversational” Design

Outreach to universities

• Promoting student memberships at places with computational linguistics programs such as UCSD, Berkley
• International universities