Voice This! #5 A holiday gift
Welcome back Voice This! fam 👀
It's been a few weeks (2 months) since we published our last newsletter issue. Hope you didn't miss us too much! Between life crises and illness, the VTP team has been on another forced podcast hiatus. If we could do this podcasting thing as a full-time job, we'd have probably already wrapped up season 1. As it stands, we're still reviewing the content for our LAST episode of the season. We're almost there, folks! It's a good one, we promise.
We don't usually do this... 🎙
On a normal newsletter issue, I'd plug one of our own podcast episodes and thank Millani for the 1094398th time for taking the initiative to make a legit podcast full of educational value™.
Today, we're plugging someone else's podcast episode 👻
Last month, the UI Breakfast podcast finally released the episode on Conversation Design with Rebecca Evanhoe. Admittedly, we also *did* just feature our own episode with Rebecca last issue, but this interview was particularly inspiring to hear, in a kind of revision of all CxD concepts. Rebecca does well to summarize her many years of learnings about the industry into an easily digestible format. We love to see it :)
(Watching) corner 📚
We're really switching it up this week, aren't we? We usually share long-form articles here in our reading corner, but this time we'd like to share something special!
ICYMI ✨
Millani and I cameo'd last month at Hillary Black's monthly group mentorship call, where we talked all about portfolios and answered tons of CxD portfolio questions that usually go unanswered in larger public forums!
You can watch the recording here:
But in case anyone *does* want to catch up on some reading, here are a few picks:
By elaineinthebay: The CxD Toolkit https://uxplanet.org/the-cxd-toolkit-1aa678cc9788
Teaching machines when to laugh in a conversation: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/15/scientists-teach-robot-laugh-right-time-research
"Designers have to provide developers with information about user expectations, too. They can fine-tune the algorithms to prevent bad responses." in: https://uxstudioteam.com/ux-blog/ai-ux/
Audience Q&A 💌
This is the part of our newsletter created by you! Every issue a lucky listener will be able to get their question featured and answered by Millani and Elaine.
This week’s question is one we don't really have a great answer for, but it's great food for thought:
Where do you think Voice will be in 5 years.
Elaine: My answer is: voice technology will exist on more devices. It'll be part of wearables, more home and work products, even new products we can't even imagine, and it'll live on more design tools like Figma. Of course, that last one might change a bit now that Figma has gotten acquired by Adobe, but I do see more design tools adding voice design prototyping into a default part of their product experience. By then, there will be more conversation designers working in more multimodal contexts who are part of larger cross-functional teams with the need for tools that help reflect that.
Millani: Oh, I love this question! By the way, have I mentioned I love this part of our newsletter and the questions we get?
A part of me wants to be optimistic and say the world will adopt voice seamlessly. Unfortunately, there are still many hurdles to voice adoption, but I believe we can inch closer to eliminating those gaps. I’ll name some from the top of my head, but let’s do some manifesting— shall we?
More language coverage and different dialects, accents, and speaking abilities with more robust ASR tech
Voice search that becomes less of a novelty and more of a part of our day-to-day (I love voice search)
Personalized voice experiences that still comply with user privacy policies
Ethical and secure voice experiences
There are so many companies and practitioners working towards a beautiful future with Voice and, in 5 years, we’re going to see some cool stuff. I can’t wait!
Join the discussion on Twitter!
This week, Dr. Hadas Kotek asked: "What does a conversation designer do?" Have an answer? Join the thread below!
Thanks for Reading This!
As always, thank you for the newsletter love 💜
If you want your question answered in the next edition of our newsletter, please email us at voicethispod@gmail.com or send us a question through our Instagram DMs.
Slay.