Craig Pugsley – Designing voice interactions

Conversational UIs will be the fifth interaction paradigm. After punch-cards, consoles, WIMP and touchscreens, voice and chat is destined to be the next digital frontier. The major tech players are at war with each other for your living room, and the rate of change is staggering.

In this session we’ll cover the entire conversational UI landscape: from the predominantly voice-first platforms of Amazon and Google, to Facebook’s push into messaging and chatbots. We’ll focus on the tools, processes and techniques you’ll need as a designer creating your very first conversational app. We’ll start by surfing the bleeding-edge – what smart speakers are out there already? What’s coming? We’ll discuss chat platforms, tooling & their limitations.

But this will be a very hands-on workshop. You’ll create your first chatbot. We’ll pick a use-case, write our first scripts, user test them, iterate and build our first working conversational assistant.

About Craig

Craig loves making things and making things make sense. He’s the Director and Creative Lead at StudioFlow – a digital studio specialising in emerging technologies, voice apps and chatbots – pushing the frontiers of how people engage with next-gen tech.

A hopeless technophile, Craig has been obsessed with everything bleepy since he plugged in his first Spectrum, back in the darkest 80s. After studying AI & machine learning at uni, he helped found a tech startup, worked for two of the biggest tech companies in the world, and was creative lead in a FTSE 100’s tech innovation product research lab. Alongside running StudioFlow, he hosts the South West’s leading community of voice apps and chatbot designers and builders: VCSW – Voice apps & Chatbots South West.