Karen Kaushansky is a conversation designer at Google that led the Google Assistant UX design for WearOS and, more recently, for the Pixel Watch. While there has been a lot of attention around conversational UX on smart speakers and mobile phones, wearables introduce new variables and different mental models. Kaushansky goes into detail about designing voice experiences for the watch, what it's like to be an API or embedded in the software, how it's different when you also control the hardware or run software on the device, and more. 

The interview also discusses how conversation design has changed over the past 25 years. Kaushansky started in the industry in the 1990s and has seen many technology shifts over the years. This also enables us to update our discussion on multimodal interfaces, which was the focus of her appearance on episode 40 of the Voicebot Podcast five years ago. We finish up with a discussion about large language models and the role of conversation designers in applications built on generative AI technologies. She also offers a great tip for designers on navigating this change that is the center of so much discussion today. 

Kaushansky began her career as a speech technology designer at Nortel, then spent time at Nuance, Microsoft, and Jawbone. At Microsoft, she was part of the team that created Cortana and deployed it on the Windows phone. She joined Google in 2019 and has led user experience design for Google Assistant on a number of products.