Over the past few weeks, I have brought in executives from three companies with specialty assistants that have shown early promise: Deutsche Telekom, Josh.ai, and Aider. Today, we take a different angle on this topic and focus specifically on the design of specialty assistants. And, we invited a crew that has worked on multiple specialty assistants over the past few years. 

 

My guests are Christophe Esslinger, Mohamed Hassan. and Dr. Barbara Baumeister all from VUI Agency in Germany. Christophe is Director of VUI Agency and a co-founder. He earned a PhD in economics from the University of Mannheim and later was a co-founder of Botflux, a chatbot technology and UX design firm. He launched VUI Agency in 2017.

 

Hassan is a Voice AI Experience Architect and design lead. Before VUI he worked at Denkwerk in Cologne as a senior experience designer, also working primarily in voice interactive solutions. He has a master's degree in integrated design from the Koln International School of Design and is studying for his PhD. Barbara is Voice Architect with previous experience working on Cortana at Microsoft and has a PhD in phonetics and language processing from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. 

 

We cover a wide range of topics from their work with Swisscom and other companies defining voice assistant personas, establishing a structured voice assistant design process, working with internal client teams, and much more.