Designing for voice interaction can be an intimidating concept for a generation of designers trained primarily in visual principles and patterns. But there’s a greater need for voice designers than there are folks experienced in voice design. Join us and see how the skills you already have can translate to this evolving design specialty. In this workshop, you’ll learn the basics of voice design and apply those skills to begin the design of your own voice app.

We begin by reviewing basic terminology you’ll need to communicate with other voice designers and speech scientists. Learn the difference between an intent and a slot, the importance of context, and principles for setting your customers up for success in a few simple words.

Voice interface design deliverables take many forms. We’ll review best practices and how to scale the process down for your initial explorations, or how to scale it up if you’re working with consumer-scale voice products.

Finally, we dive into an hour-long structured hands-on activity session where we walk through the process of creating voice design deliverables. You can choose to work along with the class example, or bring your own idea and receive some feedback along the way.

Participant takeaways

• A basic cross-company vocabulary for dealing with voice design
• Understanding of the technology and constraints inherent to today’s natural language understanding (NLU) systems
• A set of basic guidelines to guide creation of successful voice designs
• Examples of key voice design deliverables and their role in the process: storyboarding, flows, sample dialogs and final prompts

Requirements:

Intermediate design experience (either professional or educational) is recommended, but all are welcome. Bring pencil and paper (or a laptop if preferred) to work through your own starter flows and dialogs.