It’s time to vote! -UPDATE

Due to technical difficulties, our currently-underway election for the AVIxD Board of Directors is invalid. We have set up a new vote using SurveyMonkey, available online immediately, and have extended the cutoff deadline to Sunday, December 20 at midnight EST. That gives us a window of ten days, the same amount of time set aside for the current nullified process.

Sorry for this inconvenience, but we have to ask those of you who have already voted to please go to the link below and vote again. We have no record of your previous vote and you may vote for the same individuals or you may change your mind as you wish. Don’t worry, there will be no “double count” or trail, and the vote is fully anonymous with the exception that SurveyMonkey will not accept more than one vote from the same IP address.

Now to the candidates…

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The AVIxD board has four seats up for election and five candidates have been nominated for these seats: current board members Amy Goodwin, Crispin Reedy and Helen VanScoy; Carrie Claiborn; and, Jamey White.  The voting is now open to current paid AVIxD members.  Members will receive an email with a link to the voting site where they’ll be able to vote for up to four of the candidates.  Voting ends December 20th (EST).

Not a current member?  No problem!  You can get your membership up-to-date here at http://avixd.org/membership/ – enrollments received on or before the 20th will receive a link to the ballot.

It’s important to note that one of our incumbents, Bruce Balentine, has opted not to re-run for his seat.  Bruce has been a long-time part of AVIxD and obviously continues to be a tremendous driver in the VUI discipline.  We are immensely grateful for his service and we’re committed to finding new and creative ways to rope him into continued service.  On behalf of the board and the AVIxD community, thank you, Bruce!

Without further ado, here are your nominees:

Amy Goodwin (Incumbent)

Over the last two years, I have worked on the AVIxD board as Treasurer, Brown Bag committee member and as Web Master.  I orchestrated the complete redesign and re-launch of the AVIxD website and am in the process of overhauling the finances for the board.  I would very much like to continue my work on the board.  A little about myself, I am a Senior Speech Technologist at West and a 21 year veteran in the speech industry.  I have written thousands of directed dialogue grammars, provided analysis, design and deployment of natural language IVR solutions, as well as written natural language grammar solutions for several applications. I have been a designer, voice coach, audio engineer and speech scientist.  I have a passion for AVIxD and enjoy the work I have invested in the organization.

As I said in my first election: “I feel this is an organization that has a purpose and can be a valuable resource in our industry. With my varied background, I will be a valuable addition to the organization. I will do everything I can to promote quality user interface design standards and practices to enhance and improve the speech recognition industry.” This is still true today!

Crispin Reedy (Incumbent)

 I am currently working as a VUI designer at Versay systems.  I have been working in this field for over 10 years at various speech and IVR companies.  I am especially interested in learning from other design disciplines and am currently working on the UX certificate from Bentley University, as well as being a Certified Usability Analyst.

 I am very appreciative of the opportunity to have served the AVIxD organization as president these past two years and would love the opportunity to return and continue supporting the board and AVIxD members. I have served on the Brown Bag committee which has had 5 successful webinars this year. And, as President, I have also assisted other committees on an ad hoc basis.  During these last two years AVIxD has rebooted the website, finalized the wiki, revived the publicity committee, and laid the groundwork for a new journal.  In the future we hope to pursue official nonprofit status, start up the education committee, and keep our current successful projects going. It has been an exciting and energetic two years and I hope to keep the momentum going!

Helen VanScoy (Incumbent)

Helen has been working as a voice user interface designer in the Speech and IVR industry since 1996. Besides focusing on VUI design, her experience includes localization of design, human factors, and usability. Helen’s bilingual upbringing, passion for communication, and background in linguistics and teaching all help her create designs that effectively serve users from many walks of life.

Helen has been a member of the AVIxD board since 2013, and was co-chair and  contributor to the AVIxD VUI design standards wiki (http://videsign.wikispaces.com), a collaborative effort of VUI designers across the industry, since its inception in 2011.

Prior to joining PTP, she worked as a Senior User Interface Designer at Nuance (formerly ScanSoft and SpeechWorks) and in the speech group at Technology Resources Inc. (TRI), the research and development organization at SBC. Her specialty is speech and DTMF IVR user interface design with a focus in human factors, usability, and user-centered design. Helen’s experience includes designing, tuning and testing automated speech recognition telephony systems. She is also a certified Emotional Intelligence (EI) coach.

Carrie Claiborn

Hi! I’m Carrie Claiborn, and I’d like to throw my hat in the ring as a candidate for the AVIxD Board of Directors.  I am constantly surprised by the lack of awareness of our specialized VUI discipline.  Not a week goes by that I fail to receive well-meaning feelers from recruiters for “UX roles” – which, inevitably, are web design positions.  Conversely, conversational speech interfaces are frequently deployed by well-meaning folks who aren’t necessarily aware of the ramifications of their dialog design.  Time and again, users demonstrate their aversion to awkward or confusing interfaces, yet far too often deployed interactions fail to heed user experience concerns. Especially in the contact center arena, voice is dismissed as old hat (not to be confused with the one I’m throwing in here); in the rush to embrace new service channels, it’s easy to forget the IVR.  However, it’s important to realize over 70% of digital customer journeys still end in the voice channel, which clearly puts the experience of that phone call at the forefront of customers’ perception of an organization.  I am passionate about building the awareness the VUI field now lacks.  I firmly believe that increased understanding of the bottom-line benefits of good user experience will advance adoption of user-centered design processes, as well as increase user engagement.

As an AVIxD member, I responded to the Board’s request for help with outreach in May of this year. I was a founding member and have been an active part of AVIxD’s Marketing and Communications Committee since.  I love the opportunity to meet and engage with peers in the speech industry, but I also see AVIxD as a unique chance to coordinate speech user interface designers across channels.  I am particularly interested in engaging folks who specialize in the non-IVR speech recognition deployments to share their expertise with peers in AVIxD.

Currently, I work for VoxGen delivering elegant, effective automated experiences designed to delight customers.  I joined VoxGen in May of 2012 as a Senior User Experience Design Consultant, but had my first indoctrination to voice user interface design in 2003 with IBM.  Since then, I’ve worked on the voice interfaces for many major companies, including Allstate, Sprint and Anthem WellPoint.

Jamey White

For the last seven years, I have been a VUI designer for Convergys composing and optimizing intuitive speech recognition interfaces across a variety of industries.  During that time, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with numerous designers and business stakeholders to not only deliver working solutions but also enrich my expertise – many times through consulting the ongoing AVIxD design wiki.  Earlier this year, I actively assisted with the finalization of the wiki by contributing and reviewing content.  I’ve also had the opportunity to serve as a panelist on various IVR application topics at previous SpeechTEK conferences.  Prior to Convergys, I was a graduate student under the guidance of Dr. Juan Gilbert at Auburn University where I earned a Master of Science in Software Engineering.  While at Auburn, Dr. Gilbert afforded me an opportunity to work with a local company designing two different speech-enabled IVR applications.  I hope I can count on your vote and look forward to serving as an AVIxD board member where I can further promote and  develop an industry that has given me so much.

AVIxD Board Members Election — 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 currently has 8 members with 4 seats up for re-election.

The current members whose terms are complete are Crispin Reedy (Versay), Amy Goodwin (West), Bruce Balentine (EIG), and Helen Vanscoy (PTP). The members who have a year left to serve are Mark Smolensky (AT&T), Deborah Rapinski (Digital DataVoice), Shelley Moore (Verizon), Kristie Goss (Convergys).

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 Friday Nov. 20. 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 on-line, starting Dec 1st, ending Dec 10th 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 2015 Election Committee

Call for Speakers AVIxD Virtual Brown Bag Series 2016

Call for Speakers  AVIxD Virtual Brown Bag Series 2016

AVIxD is once more looking for a few good speakers! We had a wonderful run in 2015 with interesting folks like David Attwater of EIG, Lisa Falkson from Cloudcar, and UHG’s Dave Claiborn. In 2016, we hope to present 6 sessions!

The AVIxD Brown Bags are informal sessions held via conference call and online meeting (we provide the bridge and host the web meeting). They’re free and open to all. We record each session and make them available to AVIxD members on the AVIxD website. We’re hoping for lots of community participation to continue making this series fun, interesting, and insightful!

We’re interested in a wide variety of topics, including VUI design, technical topics, and interaction design. For 2016, we’re especially interested in the following (intentionally vague and broad) areas:

(1) VUI Design: Introductory Level

(2) VUI Design: Advanced Level

(3) VUI / Speech Technical Topic

(4) VUI Methodologies and/or Tools

(5) Multimodal and/or Omnichannel

(6) GUI or UCD topic

The point of this topic list is to ensure we have an interesting and well-rounded variety of speakers, but if you’re absolutely dying to talk about something that doesn’t quite seem to fit, send it along anyway. And – if you know of someone you think might be a good speaker, send their info, too!

Typically, speakers present on their topic for 45 minutes and field questions from attendees during the last 15 minutes, but we’re also open to having a panel discussion, if someone would like to organize that. Sessions are normally held on the first Tuesday of the month at noon Eastern time, though we’re flexible if that’s impractical for our speaker.

To be considered, please send us:

* A title of your proposed talk

* A few bullet points about your topic – bonus points if you have slides already J

* A short professional bio

* Your time zone Please send your submissions to contact@avixd.org no later than December 1st.

Thanks – and, see you in the lunchroom!

AVIxD Virtual Brown Bag Series 2015

VBB

You’re Invited!

 

The Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD) is pleased to announce its free Speaker Series 2015 schedule. 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?)

2015 Brown Bags

  • March 3rd: “Practical VUI Lessons from Open Speech Deployments”   David Attwater and Caroline Collins from Enterprise Integration Group (UK)
  • May 5th: “Ubiquitous Voice: An Introduction and an Overview of the Ecosystem” Lisa Falkson from CloudCar
  • July 7th: “A Case for Natural Language”  David Claiborn from United Health Group
  • September 1st: SpeechTEK Debrief
  • November 3rd: Microsoft’s “Language Understanding Intelligent Service” (LUIS)  Jason Williams, Microsoft Research

 

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://avixd.eventbrite.com/ 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!

 

Here are the details on each session and our speakers:

 Upcoming Brown Bags

 

November 3rd, 12:00 (Eastern)

Microsoft’s “Language Understanding Intelligent Service” (LUIS) 

Microsoft’s LUIS, “Language Understanding Intelligent Service,” is a web-based platform for quickly creating machine-learning based language understanding models, with very minimal machine-learning skills.  The model is deployed to an HTTP endpoint, and can be used by any application connected to the internet with a simple HTTP call.  The project webpage is at www.luis.ai

Jason Williams, Microsoft Research

Jason Williams is a senior researcher interested in dialog management, dialog and user modeling, turntaking, confidence scoring and language uncertainty.  For more information, see http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/jawillia/

 

 

 Past Brown Bags

September 1st, 12:00 (Eastern)

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.

JULY 7th, 12:00 (Eastern)

A Case for Natural Language

 In March, David Attwater and Caroline Collins of EIG stepped through analyses of their real-world, open speech deployments, providing insight to the advantages and shortcomings of natural language and the unique design solutions they’ve identified to improve outcomes.  In this session, David Claiborn will share a customer-driven case study exploring the unique challenges identified around technologies geared toward the consumer health insurance population.  We’ll examine the value story which spurred a major organization’s decision to invest in natural language as well as the actual outcomes realized post-deployment.

David Claiborn

David Claiborn is a Product Owner for United Health Group’s Optum organization.  He has been with UHG for nearly a decade, having joined as a VUI designer after getting his start in IBM’s Global Services division.  A former Peace Corps volunteer originally from Kansas, he now lives in how-can-it-possibly-be-this-hot-in Columbia, South Carolina, with his wife and best friend, Carrie, and their daughter, Margot, who is on a path to take over the world.

May 5th, 12:00 (Eastern)

Ubiquitous Voice: An Introduction and an Overview of the Ecosystem

Voice — the ultimate and the most natural of all interfaces — is going to play a major role in how humans interact with the increasing intelligence surrounding them. Siri kicked off the emergence of voice in October 2011, followed by Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana. Beyond the speaking smartphone, we have also seen the emergence of smaller plays, like The Ubi, Ivee, Martian Watches, Jibo, and XOWi, and not so small ones as well, such as the Echo that just came out from Amazon. In this talk, we will provide a high level introduction to the concept of Ubiquitous Voice experiences and how such experiences differ from traditional telephony based voice interactions. We will then present a high level overview of the Ubiquitous Voice ecosystem landscape, touching not only on the front applications, but also reviewing some of the key technologies that enable the deployment of Ubiquitous Voice products and solutions.

 

Lisa Falkson

Lisa Falkson is a Senior VUI/UX Designer at CloudCar, with over 15 years of experience in speech recognition research and industry. In the past year, she launched 3 Amazon digital products incorporating speech: Fire TV, Fire Phone, and Echo. Prior to that, she worked for 7 years as a Business Analyst, VUI Architect and Speech Technology Specialist at Nuance Communications. She also worked for 2 years at a small startup named Volio, creating interactive video experiences guided by the user’s voice. Lisa holds a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from UCLA. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her husband and son (who recently turned 6), playing/watching sports, and lifting weights. In her earlier life, she was a competitive tennis and field hockey player.

March 3rd, 12:00 (Eastern)

Practical VUI Lessons from Open Speech Deployments

Deployment of open speech solutions for call centres is now mainstream. In this talk we will attempt to distil our learnings from several deployments at various stages of maturity. This talk will take an honest look at the strengths and weaknesses of the technology and the design solutions that are driven by these issues. Where are the real business benefits of open speech? (and where does it threaten existing performance). Why do some clients take out their open speech solutions, even after significant investment? We do not presume to have the answers to all of these questions. Instead this talk is intended to help VUI designers ask the right questions of themselves and their stakeholders.

 

David Attwatter

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.

 

Caroline Collins

Caroline has over 15 years of experience providing VUI consultancy in the UK, US, Europe and Africa including numerous projects in finance, utilities, telecommunication, retail, and government. She has a BA(Hons) in Linguistics and MSc in Speech and Language Processing. She is a passionate advocate of user-centric design and also enjoys baking.

Call for Papers: AVIxD Voice Interaction Design Journal

The Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD) announces the creation of a new professional journal, Voice Interaction Design, and invites practitioners and researchers to submit papers for possible inclusion in the Journal.

Journal Details

The journal is to be a peer-reviewed professional publication that focuses on the use of voice technologies to design, test, and deploy user interfaces that are effective, efficient, effortless, and satisfying. The full title of the Journal is:

Voice Interaction Design: The Journal of the Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD)

The Journal will be published electronically in pdf format. There will be two issues per year, with publication dates on April 1 and October 1. Each new issue will be posted on the AVIxD website, and may be read directly online or downloaded on an article-by-article basis. The first issue will be October 1, 2015.

In some cases, the Editorial Board may create a Special Issue with a specific theme. Papers that are appropriate to such a theme may be reserved for the Special Issue rather than being published in the current issue regardless of timing.

Submission Guidelines

The Editorial Board welcomes papers on any topic related to voice interaction. Suggested topics might include:

  • Dialog design techniques and methods for different settings (e.g., IVR, mobile apps, cars, etc.);
  • Usability testing methods;
  • Case studies;
  • Grammar development, testing and/or theory;
  • Machine learning and/or adaptation;
  • Design representation;
  • Corpus management; and,
  • Design philosophy.

Papers may address these or any other topic relevant to the AVIxD community. Papers that are commercial in nature or that promote specific products will not be considered.

Anyone may submit a paper – you need not be an AVIxD member. Submitted papers must be “camera-ready”, and should be submitted in both Word and PDF formats to: contact@AVIxD.org.

Every submitted paper should consist of:

  • Title with optional subtitle;
  • Authors;
  • Short abstract (50 – 150 words);
  • Very short authors bios (name, title, association, brief credential, total 50 words);
  • The body of the paper including illustrations; and,
  • References.

There are no length restrictions; short papers or essays may be only 1000 words or so, while longer articles of 10,000 words or even more will be considered. The length of the abstract, illustrations, citations and references should be commensurate with and proportional to the overall length of the paper.

Submissions may be received at any time (no specific deadline). The Editorial Board will acknowledge receipt of the submission and then distribute the paper to reviewers. Papers may be accepted in current form, or reviewers may come back with recommendations for changes and updates. Neither the reviewers nor the board will insert inline edits or markup, but instead will provide any written comments via e-mail.

Accepted papers will be posted in most cases in the current online issue of the journal, allowing the current issue to grow dynamically throughout the two quarters of its life. The current issue will then be frozen on its formal issue date. Papers that do not make the freeze date will become available for publication in the next issue. As a rule of thumb, assume that any paper targeted for the first issue (October 1, 2015) must be submitted before the end of July to allow for review and publication activities. Our goal is to make publication as timely as possible, allowing quick review and immediate posting rather than delaying until some distant publication date.

The papers should conform to standard APA style guide common in the journal community. A summary of the APA style guide may be accessed at Purdue OWL (Online Writing Library) for their summary of APA style —

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/.

Editorial Board and Reviewers

The Editorial Board for the first journal issue consists of the four AVIxD Board members that currently sit on the Publications Committee:

  • Bruce Balentine, Chief Scientist, Enterprise Integration Group
  • Susan Hura, Principle, SpeechUsability
  • James R. (Jim) Lewis, Ph.D., CHFP, Senior Human Factors Engineer, IBM Software Group
  • Mark Smolensky, Principal Member of Technical Staff, AT&T Services, Inc.

Editorial Board members may review the papers themselves or may solicit special expertise from the larger AVIxD membership or from the professional community at large. Reviewers will be enlisted according to any special knowledge or expertise required to competently evaluate the submission.

Anyone interested in volunteering for an assignment as a reviewer should contact AVIxD directly via the e-mail address above.