Mark your calendars! The Association for Voice Interaction Design will once again hold its 2017 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, on Monday, grab your lunch and head over to the Madison room.****

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! #SpeechTEK2017 @avixd

Here’s the link to EventBrite:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2017-avixd-members-meeting-live-and-virtual-tickets-33055904099

Update:  This event has been postponed.  We will be discussing at the annual meeting.

Call for Participation  |  AVIxD Workshop 2017

Design Guidelines for Conversational User Interfaces

Proposals Due March 29, 2017

Sunday, 23 April 2017 |  Afternoon  | Just prior to SpeechTEK 2017

Washington, D.C.

The Association for Voice Interaction Design is seeking proposals for the 2017 workshop on voice interaction design, “Design Guidelines for Conversational User Interfaces.”  The AVIxD workshop is a hands-on session in which voice interaction design practitioners come together to debate a topic of interest to our community. The workshop is an opportunity to meet with your peers and delve deeply into a single issue. Visit us online at avixd.org to see white papers from previous workshops and to learn how you can be part of AVIxD.

This year’s workshop will build on the results of the 2016 workshop, in which we defined a set of issues and questions around conversational user interfaces (AVIxD Workshop 2016 Draft). This year, our goal is to begin to address these questions and modify and/or amend the AVIxD Design Guidelines (http://videsign.wikispaces.com/).  To be considered for the workshop, individuals must submit a position paper of approximately 250 words addressing an issue related to design guidelines for conversational user interfaces. We encourage you to share your hands-on experiences and support your position with available evidence. Potential topics include:

• A response to one of the specific issues raised in the 2016 workshop
• A clarification or elaboration on one of the issues
• Introduction of a relevant issue we failed to include
• An argument against one or more of the topics

The workshop is free for invited participants who are active AVIxD members; non-members will be charged $55, and the fee will cover AVIxD annual membership dues as well.

Please submit your paper via email no later than March 29, 2017 to avixdworkshop@gmail.com. Letters of acceptance and details about meeting time and location will be sent out shortly thereafter.

We look forward to seeing you in D.C.!  Send questions, comments, or complaints to avixdworkshop@gmail.com or to any of the workshop committee.

Kristie Flenord

Amy Goodwin

Shelley Moore

Susan Hura

The Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD) is pleased to announce Brown Bags are continuing in 2016. Mark your calendar, bring your peanut butter sandwiches and gather ‘round the virtual meeting table for the following series of free, interesting and informative talks. And they’re free! (Did we mention they’re free?)

On Dec 13th at 12pm ET: Standardized Questionnaires for Voice Interaction Design

Standardization of measurement is an important aspect of scientific and engineering processes. The benefits of standardization include easier replication, economical reuse, effective communication, and enhanced generalization. The primary purpose of this brown bag is to provide a summary and discussion of the published research on standardized questionnaires suitable for use in the assessment of voice interaction design.  The presentation portion will summarize currently available questionnaires, and the discussion will focus on the gaps between the currently available questionnaires and the needs of future research in and development of applications and services that use voice interaction.

A little about Jim:

James R. (Jim) Lewis is a senior human factors engineer (at IBM since 1981), with a primary focus on the design and evaluation of voice user interfaces. He is a Certified Human Factors Professional with a PhD in Experimental Psychology (Psycho-linguistics). He has experience in all areas of speech system usability, is the author of Practical Speech User Interface Design (2011), and in 2012 was voted onto the board of the Association of Voice Interaction Design, currently serving as immediate past-president.

Here’s the EventBrite link for Jim’s session.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/standardized-questionnaires-for-voice-interaction-design-tickets-29118705833

On August 9th at 1pm ET: A/B Testing with User Feedback

A/B testing is a powerful tool for making design decisions that involves running controlled experiments between design options and measuring how they perform in the field. Incorporating user feedback into an A/B test allows you to include user preferences into the decision-making and even generate new design ideas. This presentation explores why to incorporate user feedback into the A/B testing process, how to construct a useful test, and what to do with the data once collected.

Peter Leppik is co-founder and CEO of Vocal Laboratories Inc., and has led the company through the development and implementation of its award-winning customer service survey services. Leppik is co-author of Gourmet Customer Service, and is a frequent speaker at call center industry events. Prior to founding VocaLabs in 2001, Mr. Leppik was an analyst following call center and related technologies. Mr. Leppik holds an M.S. degree in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and serves on the board of directors of the Minnesota Children’s Museum.

On June 14th at 1pm ET:  SpeechTEK Debrief and Open Round Table Discussion

AVIxD Brown Bag committee members Crispin Reedy (Versay) and Amy Goodwin (West) will bring provocative questions and interesting topics for discussion inspired by industry trends and sessions from SpeechTEK. Bring your own questions too! This open-form Q&A session will be lively and engaging and you’re sure to learn something.

On April 19th at 1pm ET,  Deborah Rapsinski will be presenting:  Measuring Customer Effort.  (See Videos for a recap.)

The measurement of customer effort is such an important, yet often overlooked, unconsidered or underappreciated factor in evaluating customer satisfaction.  In this brown bag session, we’ll discuss approaches to measuring customer effort, indicators of increased effort and how to interpret these metrics to create a plan to enhance the customer experience.

A little about Deborah:

Deborah Rapsinski is the Director of Contact Center Strategy Services at Digital DataVoice. She has extensive experience in the design and execution of contact center strategies and user experience. Deborah played an integral part in the strategic design of large, enterprise level well multi-channel service strategies and implementations in support of Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies, including market leaders in the financial services, banking, health care, travel and hospitality and consumer electronics verticals.  Deborah is a linguist by education and has worked in the speech industry since 1996 with companies including SBC TRI, Nuance Communications, and BBN Avoke.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Each session will consist of a 45-minute presentation and a 15-minute Q&A, except for the last session, which will be more of a roundtable.

To sign up for any or all of these sessions, please go to our AVIxD Eventbrite Page at:

http://www.eventbrite.com/o/association-for-voice-interaction-design-avixd-7930767466#live_events

The sessions will be recorded and archive sessions will be made available to all AVIxD members as part of our knowledge base. We’re very excited about this opportunity to learn and to share our professional knowledge and expertise!

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Guidelines for Conversational User Interfaces

Have you, or do you want to, write a user interface for Alexa, Siri, Jibo, or Google Home? Or perhaps you are interested in designing for a chatbot or an intelligent personal assistant?  If so… we are looking for YOU!

AVIxD’s 2016 Workshop at SpeechTEK, “Ubiquitous Speech:  Creating Guidelines for Designing Conversational User Interfaces,” was a great success, with lively and interesting discussions on such topics as:

– What counts as a conversational user interface?
– How might we evaluate these UIs?
– What are the various classifications or contexts in which we will see these UIs?
– How do the various types of interactions (visual, spoken, touch) interplay?  At what point does one take precedence over another?
– Should the user always initiate the dialog, or should the system sometimes initiate the dialog? Under what circumstances?

The AVIxD Workshop working group is currently codifying the workshop notes, and, in the coming days, will be joining together with the AVIxD Wiki working group in our ongoing effort to expand the scope of our guidelines into this exciting and interesting new territory.  Are you interested in this area? Or are you currently working in this area?  We could use your help!  Discuss topics, share your expertise, and contribute, as a writer, or as a reviewer.  For more information contact susan@speechusability.com

We were able to have the annual meeting again this year at SpeechTEK.  It was a great meeting.  Thanks to all that attended!

Here’s the deck that was shown at the meeting: