I thought I would start my first blog post with an achievement and a significant part of my journey.
I’m Adam and I am currently training to be a voice interaction and conversation designer. There are many explanations of what that is exactly, but the one that sticks with me most is this:
A Conversation Designer is responsible for designing and building compelling conversational experiences between humans and technology, leveraging artificial intelligence and design techniques.
Another great explanation is from Google
“The role of a Conversation Designer is like that of an architect, mapping out what users can do in a space, while considering both the user’s needs and the technological constraints. They curate the conversation, defining the flow and its underlying logic in a detailed design specification that represents the complete user experience.”
Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
My role as a Voice Interaction Designer, uses these same concepts to design user experiences, but through the power of voice, utilising speech alongside other modalities. By being able to converse with technology using just your voice, had got me incredibly excited and I just had to dig deeper into technology and design process.
By enrolling on a Voice Interaction Design Course with the Digital Assistant Academy, it has enabled me to establish a strong understanding of the fundamentals of voice and conversation design. By pushing myself out of my comfort zone, I am constantly learning various methods and techniques of the design process, whilst also gaining a much deeper level of understanding of the technology behind speech systems.
So…fast forward four months within the course, (and the main point of this blog post), I have designed by first voice application and currently am in the testing and reiteration stage of the process to ensure improvements are continued throughout the design. In doing so, I uploaded the design from Voiceflow to Google Actions to begin the next phase of testing. This was where things really got exciting.
This was the first time I could actually test my design on an actual Google device, rather than from a design platform. To be able to talk to a Google Mini device to actually interact with my design was a pretty proud moment for me, albeit a test version but still nevertheless a milestone in my journey into Voice interaction Design. It has made me want to research more, design more and learn more into this exciting and forward thinking industry, and I look forward to delving further into it.