Karen Kaushansky Conversation Designer at Google Talks UX for Wearables, LLMs, and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 297

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.