A 2019 survey by PWC showed that over 90% of consumers aged between 18–64 years had sought knowledge about voice technology, while over 70% had used it at least once. This massive wave of consumers adopting voice technology for home improvement and ease-of-usage has ushered in a new age for…

The use of voice assistants has been on a rise over the last few years. According to a recent eMarketer report, 38.5% of the US population used a voice assistant in 2020 — that is almost 120+ million users in a year and an increase of 6 million from the…

Ethics in conversation design refers to the consideration of moral principles when designing and developing AI experiences. This is a topic that is not often discussed as part of the design process, perhaps because it’s difficult to talk about, or maybe is often ignored. …

Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Samsung’s Bixby may be the flag bearers of voice assistants (VAs) but the technology itself is no longer limited to megacorporations. Instead, it is finding its way to numerous enterprise-level applications. This new wave of adoption is evident in recent statistics too: Global…

Welcome to part 2 of our tutorial on multimodal conversation design. In part 1 we learned about the basics of multimodal design and its related inputs and outputs. …

Welcome to part 1 of our tutorial on multimodal conversation design. Today we’ll take an in-depth look at what multimodal design is and learn more about its related components. Then in part 2, we’ll discuss best practices, use cases, and the outlook for the future. From the moment we wake…

Introduction A common piece of writing advice is to “write what you know”. However, for conversation designers, we need to move beyond our own personal language usage, in order to provide the best conversational experience. Every person has what is known as an “idiolect”: an individual’s unique use of language that…

With nearly 1 in 4 U.S. adults already having a smart speaker in their home, voice assistants and conversational AI are quickly increasing in popularity in most major markets and becoming a normal part of people’s lives around the world. Systems like Alexa and Google Home have created a new…