Notes from the AVIxD Annual Member Meeting 2018!

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