The goal of ACIxD is to bring together previously informally-associated professionals into a more cohesive group- a group that crosses borders between companies, providers, customers, academia, and disciplines. ACIxD does this by sponsoring educational and networking opportunities such as our annual Workshops, Virtual Brown Bag Seminars, the VUI Design Wiki, and “Voice Interaction Design,” our journal.
About ACIxD
Creating conversations that matter.
Community
Discovering and defining together what it means to be voice interaction and experience designers.
Information
Sharing information: career knowledge, news, resources, and opportunities for professional growth.
Awareness
Eliminating apathy and antipathy toward the need for good design of automated voice services.
Advocacy
Advocating for the general public who use our applications and products and for good design in general.
Education
Providing educational knowledge to companies and the public about automated voice services.
Research
Spurring and conducting valid and meaningful research into voice interaction and experience design techniques.
Meet the Board
Crispin Reedy · President
Crispin Reedy is a Voice User Experience designer and usability professional at Versay Solutions. Previously she was with eLoyalty, SpeechCycle, and InterVoice. She has over 15 years of front-line design, speech usability, and tuning experience across a variety of industries, including financial, telecommunications, health care and transportation. She is especially interested in what other disciplines can bring to Voice Interaction Design, and how we can best leverage real-world data to make good design decisions.
She has frequently spoken at SpeechTEK, is a member of UXPA and IxDA, and is currently serving as President of ACIxD. She can be followed on Twitter at crispinTX.
Kristie Goss · Vice President
Kristie is a Human Factors Consultant at Concentrix. She holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from Auburn University, where she studied human centered computing under the guidance of Dr. Juan Gilbert, a prominent member of the Speech community. Kristie has worked on speech applications for numerous clients, performed copious usability studies, and is a co-inventor on a patent, “Method and System for Creating Natural Language Understanding Grammars”. She’s been working in this industry since 2004 and has presented multiple talks at SpeechTEK conferences.
Amy Goodwin · Treasurer
Amy Goodwin is a Principle Consultant at Verizon Enterprise Solutions – Professional Services and a 23 year veteran in the speech industry. She has 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. With her experience in the speech industry she has often assumed the role of subject matter expert and coach to a number of clients and peers.
Leslie Carroll Walker · Secretary
Leslie Carroll Walker is a Senior Manager of Client Services at Concentrix. She’s responsible for a team of designers and QA testers, and for ensuring that her team delivers the self-service and customer experience value promised to clients during the sales process. Her background includes over 20 years of VUI design, with emphasis on IVR. Over the last few years, her work has branched out from traditional DTMF, voice, and “How can I help you?” experiences into fully platform-wide conversational for voice and for chat, with exposure to Omilia, Amazon, Google, and Nuance tools and platforms. She joined the ACIxD board in 2019 as Secretary, and can be followed on Twitter @LeslieCWalkerCX.
Shelley Moore · Director
Nearly 20 years IVR technology experience. Currently a Senior Engineer at Verizon Enterprise Solutions – Professional Services. Extensive experience in all facets of voice user interface design that includes; requirements gathering and analysis, dialogue and call flow design, persona definition, tuning analysis, voice talent coaching, and usability / WOZ testing. Specialties: Financial, healthcare, logistics, utilities and wireless technologies. Prior work experience includes; 8+ years Senior User Interface Designer, including 2 years as a dedicated Speech Analyst. Other IVR related positions, Business Analyst, Sales Support Manager, and Outbound Notifications Product Manager.
Jamey White · Director
Jamey has been involved with speech technologies and user interface design since 2006. While focused in speech and IVR design, Jamey is also experienced in mobile, visual, and conversational IVR interactions. He has analyzed and designed speech interfaces focusing on containment and customer satisfaction across many industry verticals, including financial, health care, retail, government, and insurance. Currently, he is a Senior Human Factors Consultant at Concentrix and has presented and served on various panels at SpeechTEK. He has been an active member of ACIxD since 2016 and assisted with contributing to and reviewing the design wiki. Jamey has Master of Software Engineering degree from Auburn University with a concentration in human computer interaction.
Helen Vanscoy · Director
Helen has been working as a user interface designer and usability engineer in the Speech and IVR industry since 1996. A linguist by education, Helen is fully bilingual in English and Spanish, with working knowledge of other European languages. She has served as the lead designer on large-scale IVR projects in a variety of dialects of English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German. She has been co-chair and contributor to the ACIxD design standards wiki since its inception in 2011. Helen is currently Director of User Experience at Performance Technology Partners in San Francisco, California.
Dawn Harpster · Director
Dawn Harpster has a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Psychology and has been an interaction designer since 1997. She began her career in broadcast television as a studio engineer and has worked as a writer/producer in corporate television, a sound engineer, a camera woman, and a roadie. Dawn is passionate about leveraging back-end customer information to create efficient and satisfying user experiences, “design is psychology, we’re attempting to elicit a response from a user, how we ask a question is equally important to what we are asking.” Dawn is currently employed at PTP Inc, and lives in Omaha, Nebraska.
Mark Smolensky · Director
Mark Smolensky is a Principle Member of Technical Staff with AT&T. He is responsible for providing user experience strategic and technical direction and leadership to clients, conducting user research on the design of speech-enabled multimodal, and graphical applications interfaces for internal AT&T and external enterprise clients, and designing speech-enabled application logic. He has been involved in voice user interface design since 1986. He is the author of Human Factors in Air Traffic Control (1998), has authored dozens of human factors papers, and in 2012 was voted on to the board of the Association of Voice Interaction Design as Vice-President.
Dr. Smolensky holds a Ph.D. in Human Factors Psychology (Human Computer Interaction) and a Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology.
