Cross-linguistic & Cross-cultural Voice Interaction Design

(update at the end)

2010 saw the first SpeechTEK Conference to have taken place outside of the US, SpeechTEK Europe 2010 in London. This year’s European Conference, SpeechTEK Europe 2011, will take place again in London (25 – 26 May 2011), but this time it will be preceded on Tuesday 24th May by a special Workshop on Cross-linguistic & Cross-cultural Voice Interaction Design organised by the Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD). The main goal of AVIxD is to bring together voice interaction and experience designers from both Industry and Academia and, among other things, to “eliminate apathy and antipathy toward the need for good design of automated voice services” (that’s my favourite!). This is the first AVIxD Workshop to take place in Europe and I am honoured to have been appointed Co-Chair alongside Caroline Leathem-Collins from EIG.

Participation is free to AVIxD members and just £25 for non-members (which may be applied towards AVIxD membership). However in order to participate in the workshop, you need to submit a brief position paper in English (approx. 500 words) on any of the special topics of interest of the Workshop (See CFP below). The deadline for electronic submissions is Friday 25 March, so you need to hurry if you want to be part of it!

Here’s the full Call for (Position) Papers from the AVIxD site:

Call for Position Papers

First European AVIxD Workshop

Cross-linguistic & Cross-cultural Voice Interaction Design

Tuesday, 24 May 2011 (just prior to SpeechTEK Europe 2011), 1 – 7 PM

London, England

The Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD) invites you to join us for our first voice interaction design workshop held in Europe, Cross-linguistic & Cross-cultural Voice Interaction Design. The AVIxD workshop is a hands-on day-long session in which voice user interface practitioners come together to debate a topic of interest to the speech community. The workshop is a unique opportunity for them to meet with their peers and delve deeply into a single topic.

As in previous years with the AVIxD Workshops held in the US, we will write papers based on our discussions which we will then publish on www.avixd.org. Please visit our website to see papers from previous workshops, and for more details on the purpose of the organization and how you can be part of it.

In order to participate in the workshop, individuals must submit a position paper of approximately 500 words in English. Possible topics to touch upon in your submission (to be discussed in depth during the workshop) include:

1. Language choice and user demographics
2. Presentation of the language options to the caller and caller preference
3. Creation and (co-)maintenance of dialogue designs, grammars, prompts across languages
4. Political and sociolinguistic issues in system prompt choices and recognition grammars, such as code-switching, formal versus informal registers
5. Guidelines for application localization, translation, and interpretation
6. Setting expectations regarding availability of multilingual agents, Language- and culture-sensitive persona definition
7. Coordinating usability testing and tuning across diverse linguistic / cultural groups
8. Language choice and modality preference

We always encourage the use of specific examples from applications you’ve worked on in your position paper.

Participation is free to AVIxD members; non-members will be charged £25, which may be applied towards AVIxD membership at the workshop. Please submit your position papers via email no later than Friday 25 March 2011 to cfp@avixd.org. Letters of acceptance will be sent out on 30 March 2011.

We look forward to engaging with the European speech design community to discuss the particular challenges of designing speech solutions for users from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Feel free to contact either of the co-chairs below, if you have any questions.

Caroline Leathem-Collins, EIG  (caroline {at} eiginc {dot} com)

Maria Aretoulaki, DialogCONNECTION Ltd (maria {at} dialogconnection {dot} com)

UPDATE

SpeechTEK Europe 2011 has come and gone and I’ve got many interesting things to report (as I have been tweeting through my @dialogconnectio Twitter account).

But first, here are the slides for my presentation at the main conference on the outcome of the AVIxD Workshop on Cross-linguistic & Cross-cultural Voice Interaction Design organised by the Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD). I only had 12 hours to prepare them – including sleep and London tube commute – so I had to practically keep working on them until shortly before the Session! Still I think the slides capture the breadth and depth of topics discussed or at least touched upon at the Workshop. There are several people now writing up on all these topics and there should be one or more White papers on them very soon (by the end of July we hope!). So the slides did their job after all!

Get the slides in PDF here:  Maria Aretoulaki – SpeechTEK Europe 2011 presentation.