Annual Members Meeting at SpeechTEK!

Mark your calendars! The Association for Voice Interaction Design will once again hold its 2018 annual members meeting. This is your opportunity to find out how you can get involved! What do YOU want in a professional organization? Do you have an idea for a committee or a project? Would you like to present at a brown bag or give us a paper? We need your voice in the conversation!

If you’re coming to SpeechTEK in-person, check us out – we’re on the schedule in SD 204

Or, you can attend virtually! This year we’ll be streaming live with Periscope again. Download the app on your cell phone now from the App Store or Google Play to get ready, and follow us on Twitter @avixd.

The AVIxD organization seeks to connect folks in the voice interaction design industry. Our goal is to provide a forum for this community to find and share professional resources, while promoting awareness of the VUI field and advocating for good design practices. Not a member yet? No problem. Visit AVIxD.org ahead of time to join – or just show up to learn more.

Spread the word! #SpeechTEK2018 @avixd

Here’s the EventBrite Link:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2018-avixd-members-meeting-live-and-virtual-tickets-44917374075

 

Oh No! Wikispaces is end of life.

Hello VUIDs,

We are very sad to learn that Wikispaces has decided to discontinue its services.

However, do not fret.  AVIxD will make sure we move all our hard earned knowledge to a new interface.  Once we have more news, we will adjust our links and put out a notice.

http://blog.wikispaces.com/  To learn more about Wikispaces’ decision.

 

AVIxD Board Members Election 2018– How to Run for the Board

The board of the Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD) is preparing for the annual election of new board members. This email explains how to run for the board.

The board is expanding to 9.  Two seats are up for re-election and 2 seats available. The current members whose terms are complete are Crispin Reedy (Versay), and Amy Goodwin (West).  Members who have a year left to serve are; Helen Vanscoy (PTP), Mark Smolensky (AT&T), Deborah Rapsinski (Think Tank Partners), Kristie Goss (Convergys), and Shelley Moore (Verizon).

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@avixd.org by Wednesday March 21st. 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 AVIxD 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 28th, ending April 4th. Instructions for casting your ballot will be provided in a follow-on email. If you have any questions about the election or board member duties, feel free to contact us at contact@avixd.org.

Candidates must be current voting members of AVIxD. If you’re not a member and want to participate in the election, just join at avixd.org at the Professional level. If you have any questions about your membership status for the election, just contact us at contact@avixd.org.

Thank you very much, and we look forward to hearing from you!

AVIxD 2018 Election Committee

 

Brown Bag is Postponed to Nov 7th.

Brown Bags continue!

Please join us on Tue, November 7, 2017 at 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT when our Brown Bag Session will be presented by
Brooke Hawkins Content Designer at Nuance Communications

Parlay your VUI experience into ChatBot design

Many designers in the AVIxD community come from voice design backgrounds, and may be interested in dipping their toes into the world of chatbot/virtual assistant design. As a recent transplant from the IVR world to the chatbot design world, I’ve seen what incredible similarities there are between mediums, as well as core differences in thinking about content design for text-based conversations. I’ll share the core design principles of designing for text-based conversations, how they differ from best practices for designing for voice as a medium, and what tools voice designers can start using to build chat experiences. I’ll also briefly cover the future of chatbot design and some interesting multi-modal examples I’ve seen from things like Echo Show. Attendees can expect to learn how their voice design skills directly translate to designing multi-modal conversational experiences, as well as opportunities for designing for mediums that will necessitate core skills across both mediums.
More about Brooke
Brooke Hawkins is a Content Designer at Nuance, with years of experience designing conversational experiences for Fortune 500 clients and healthcare institutions. Some of Brooke’s design experience includes designing virtual assistants via web and SMS, creating interactive healthcare solutions to activate patients in their health, and writing content for the intro to VUI course at CareerFoundry. Brooke speaks regularly on conversational design, and has presented at the IA Summit in 2017 on the principles of voice user interface design. You can follow more of her work at: brookehawkins.com.

Please register for the event on EventBrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/parlay-your-vui-experience-into-chatbot-design-tickets-38655883789

 

 

Previous Events

Please join us on Tue, July 11, 2017 at 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT when our Brown Bag Session will be presented by
David Attwater, Senior Scientist at EIG, Inc.

Hanging Out with Alexa

In this talk we will present some results from a small sample preliminary study of Alexa in people’s homes with real tasks and talk about what works, what doesn’t and what user’s perceive as useful. We will highlight Alexa’s current strengths and limitations with specific reference to the way that people actually try to use the user interface. We’ll also discuss the general problems with design of natural spoken user-interfaces which support open-ended interactions in a limited domain which would apply to other home assistant products such as Google Home etc.

More about David

David has over 20 years’ experience researching and designing spoken user interfaces in the UK, US, Europe and Africa. He joined EIG in 2003 with responsibilities for user interface usability, design, research and development. David also manages the EIG UK Office. Before joining EIG he was head of the spoken dialog research team at the British Telecom Research Labs. David has several international patents pending and numerous publications. He holds two engineering degrees from the University of York, UK. Amongst David’s specific areas of expertise are applications using statistical language models, very large data driven applications, and Wizard of Oz usability testing on live traffic. He also has extensive experience in speech corpus collection and annotation management.

Please register for the event on EventBrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hanging-out-with-alexa-tickets-34701771934