Designing Omnichannel Conversations

The Future is Spoken presents Celene Osiecka as this week’s guest. Celene is Conversational Designer. She has been designing conversational interfaces using emerging technologies like chatbots, AI, natural language, speech recognition, and machine learning for the last fifteen years, deploying over 500 conversational interface deployments in the financial, telecommunications, travel, retail, and education industries. With a background in psychology and HCI, she currently leads a global team of conversational designers that seeks to design innovative and ground-breaking conversational interfaces.  Starting with their own experiences, they end up discussing the importance of testing and the need to make the assistants as human as possible. Tune in Now! Conversation Highlights:[00:25] Celene's journey of being a conversation designer●       Celene explains how she got into conversation designing when people didn't even knew what chatbots were.●       She started doing everything and then as the company grew, they scaled up. She started to specialize, instead of looking at everything. [03:00] Designing a digital world●       Celene touches on the key differences and commonalities that she saw while working for different platforms. She further explains her transition into voice based designing and how she missed a lot of things that used to have earlier.●       A whole new realm of challenges came up when she went from Digital to voice based designing. [06:30] What is the future of voice designing?●       She introduces us to the importance of IVR in designing the future of voice. Celene also puts the light on the incompetence of the voice and explains how Voice can never rule the entire path.●       "We can't force people into a role that they don't either want to be in depending on what their situation is." [12:10] How automation is helping many companies in this COVID scenario?●       Celene speaks about the need for automation in the present world. She also touches on how different companies are benefiting from Bots and Voice technologies. [18:08] How can we design a solution which can enable people to use more of the virtual assistant services? [21:42] What are the similarities while designing a Bot? [24:03] What about testing?●       Celene elaborates on the differences she faced while testing the Bots for different companies. She also divulges on the rigorous process of testing for the financial companies, and their hesitancy to go live.●       She also speaks about the frequency of testing their technology, and her experiences about using different methods of testing. [31:53]  Making the assistants as human as possible!●       Celene shares her experience about ensuring to cover up most of the utterances to make the assistants as natural as possible. ●       She also elaborates on the importance of data and how it is helping to build a better version of assistants, meanwhile speaking about some rare scenarios when no data is available.  Learn more about Celene at●       [24]7.ai●       LinkedIn If you enjoyed this episode of The Future is Spoken Podcast, then make sure to su This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shyamalaprayaga.substack.com