On 24 October, students from the Interactive Media Practice MA course attended a conference in Innovations in Voice Design at Amazon’s London headquarters.
The event was made up of experts in the industry at the leading edge of voice design ranging from the design of emotionally intelligent voice experience to the latest voice innovation at the pinnacle level. Speakers at the event included industry professionals from Babylon Health, Google and Amazon all working at the intersection between design, development and strategy.
The session was delivered by a team of industry experts from digital evangelists, who shared expertise, tradecraft and industry insights in voice user-interface (VUI).
Savraj Matharu, Course Leader of the Interactive Media Practice MA, highlighted the importance of employer engagement and digital transformation. He said: “We are in the midst of a digital revolution, how we interact with technology will change mainly through AI and voice interaction as seen in Siri and Alexa.
“The ease of use, effectiveness and simplicity in voice design enables significant possibilities such as engaging and assisting senior citizens in an aging population right through to interaction with vehicles through conversational design. Many of our students already operate in this space such as Apple’s iOS CarPlay and work in BMW developing ChatBots, intelligent voice agents, and intelligent systems.”
Xiaoying Xu, a student on the Interactive Media Practice MA course, who attended the event, said: “Through this Amazon event, we learned that from 2018 to 2019, smart speakers have surged in East Asia, and in mainland China they have grown by 166 per cent, which is an amazing number. Voice interaction brings great convenience to people's daily life, and it is also developing its emotional intelligence to increase user satisfaction.
“In short, this event taught us the current state of voice interaction, the future direction of its development and how to think about problems from a designer's perspective. In addition, more detailed persona development steps and guidelines are very helpful to our curriculum.”
Jia ZheWen, another student who attended the event, said: “This is a very great opportunity. As IMP students, we need to know a lot about the latest scientific and technological information, which can broaden our minds. This event is very useful. I hope we have more opportunities to join this kind of event in the future.”
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