Conversational Maxims - Erika Hall

There are many different ethical issues that arise when computers behave or replace humans, and as designers and developers for voice we must be constantly thinking about the implications and side effects of our voice experiences. Brooke Hawkins joins this episode to tackle questions about how to identify ethical issues, think through them, and emphasizes the importance of bringing ethics up early and often.

Voice experiences have a number of default intents, such as yes/no, stop, cancel, and others. It is important for experiences to customize these default intents in ways that make sense for the context the user is in. Guest Dustin Coates shares a lot of ideas for how to customize these intents and what to consider to make optimal user experiences.

The car is a prime context for voice experiences, but it also comes with a number of unique challenges. Guest Shyamlala Prayaga shares a lot of key insights into the way to design for the car, including concepts around cognitive load requirements, regulation concerns, and design decisions.

Anyone learning about building and designing voice experiences needs to have a set of tools and tactics for approaching the design and iteration. In this episode with Braden Ream and Michael Hood, we dig into several of the primary tactics and tools available for designers today, including scripting, flowcharts, and more. You'll learn about the value of these different techniques and why you will most likely want to utilize more than one in your work.

Voice experiences are extremely difficult to craft in a way that will be truly accessible and inclusive for all users. Problems can arise from things like cultural biases and local colloquialisms, social backgrounds, and accented language and terms, among others. In this episode, guest Diana Deibel joins to talk about how to raise awareness for these inclusive challenges and some tips on how to address them in your voice experiences.

Many of the conversational design principles are based on the idea of the cooperative principle, which states people work together cooperatively in conversation. The principle was defined by Linguist Paul Grice, and it is supported by four conversational maxims, with a fifth being added from linguist, Robin Lakoff. These simple maxims make the foundation for much of voice design. Erika Hall joins the show to give a detailed look at these maxims, which are the Maxim of Quality, Quantity, Relation, Manner and Politeness, and you'll learn how to apply these ideas into your conversational interfaces and experiences. 

Wally Brill of Google describes how personas are an invaluable aspect to voice and conversational design because they provide a foundation to the rest of the design process and help unify a team around a consistent experience.

The 2019 Alexa Conference highlighted a number of interesting developments in the voice space, and Bradley Metrock joins the show to discuss how the boundaries are being pushed and what it means for voice design.

The utilization of story and characterization in voice experiences is highly underrated and a key piece of the development process for the team at Xandra, who share insights into their process and techniques and how they can apply to even individual developers.

As more voice devices are built with screens, our voice experiences need to be designed with screens in mind. My guest, Mark Tucker, talks through many considerations and provides tips for how to design and build multimodal experiences that use the screen to enhance a voice experience.