Let's Talk About CUIs: Putting Conversational User Interface Design Into Practice

Christine Murad is a PhD student at the Technologies for Aging Gracefully lab in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Her research looks at the usability and design of conversational voice interfaces, and exploring the development of different tools and resources to aid in intuitive and user-friendly conversational voice interaction. She has recently co-organized related workshops at CHI 2019-2020, CSCW 2020, and IUI 2021. She is a member of the CUI conference steering committee and has helped organized both CUI 2020 and 2021. She is currently one of the demos chair for CUI 2021.

Cosmin Munteanu is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and Director of the Technologies for Ageing Gracefully lab. His research is focused on investigating information-rich media and intelligent technologies, such as speech interfaces, for several applications: mobile devices, mixed reality systems, and learning and assistive technologies for marginalized users. With almost a quarter century of research at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Automatic Speech Recognition, Natural User Interfaces, Mobile Computing, Ethics, and Assistive Technologies, Cosmin has been actively championing the inclusion of more speech research in the HCI space. He has co-organized numerous workshops, panels, and courses on the topic of voice interaction at SIGCHI and industry conferences, and has been part of the steering committee for the Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) conference series since its inception. URL: http://cosmin.taglab.ca

Martin Porcheron is a Lecturer in the Computational Foundryat Swansea University. His work examines the use of technologies such as conversational interfaces in multi-party settings like pubsand the home. He has recently co-organised workshops at CHI’18–’20 and CSCW ’16, ’17, and ’20 on topics including collocated interaction with technologies and conversational user interfaces.He is a member of the CUI conference series steering committee.

Heloisa Candello is research scientist at the IBM Research lab-oratory in Brazil. She has experience in leading and conductingdesign research activities to understand people’s contexts and moti-vations to use conversation technologies. She recently co-organized related workshop at CHI ’18–’20 and CSCW ’16, ’17, and ’20. and previously published her research on UX with conversational systems at various HCI conferences. She was also a full paper co-chairfor CUI’20.

Stephan Schlögl is an Associate Professor in the Dept. Management, Communication & IT at the MCI Management Center Innsbruck. His main research interest lies in human-computer interaction, particularly focusing on conversational user interfaces and other types of AI supported interaction modalities. He was one of the general chairs for the CUI 2020 conference.

Matthew P. Aylett has been working for over two decades inspeech synthesis both in a commercial and academic role. He has published widely on the theme of putting character and emotioninto speech synthesis and he has significant media engagementexperience in the areas of voice cloning and expressive speech synthesis. He has worked on high profile projects such as recreating JFKs voice to give his last speech. He is a trustee for the Scott Morgan Foundation which aims to encourage technological innovation and design for severe disabilities.

Jaisie Sin is a graduate student at the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the design of emerging technologies like CUIs from the perspective of preventing the marginalization of underrepresented users like older adults through design. She has co-organized related workshops at CHI ’19-’20, IUI ’20, and CSCW ’20.

Robert J. Moore is a scientist at IBM Research, Almaden, wherehe works to bridge the gap between user interface design and conversation science. He has adapted research findings from the field of Conversation Analysis, in which he is trained, to the emerging discipline of conversational UX design. The result is the Natural Conversation Framework and the Alma Design System, which provide designers with basic concepts, principles, in-teraction patterns and software components. He has co-organized past workshops on the topic at CHI’17, ’18 and ’20.

Grace Hughes is a Content Design Lead for Fjord at The Dock, Accenture’s innovation hub in Dublin, Ireland. She’s passionateabout a human-centred approach to language, and the role of content at the heart of the design process. In the Dock, she’s worked toembed content design in projects, exploring emerging technology across a range of industries. Grace is also exploring conversational design and technology, while leading a project of research and experimentation in this area. Grace has a background in the Humanities, journalism, copywriting, and UX Design. She also lectures in copy and content for the MSc. in Advertising and Digital Comms.at the Technological University of Dublin.

Andrew Ku is a Designer at Google, San Francisco Bay Area. He leads conversation design on cross-auto and cross-home Google Assistant projects. He focuses on building system frameworks to help scale conversational patterns and capabilities across different surfaces. As a strong believer that effective conversations are fundamentally multi-modal, he also evangelizes the multi-modal framework to ensure visual channels are ingrained in the consid-eration and coordination of conversation design. Prior to Google, he was one of the original designers at Amazon, who designed andshipped Amazon Echo and Alexa.