Conversations with Things

The Future is Spoken

The Future is Spoken presents Diana Deibel as this week’s guest. Diana is an experienced VUI Designer and the current Design Director at Chicago-based product design and strategy consultancy, Grand Studio, leading teams in conversation and product design. She’s the co-founder of both the VUI Design Slack channel and the Chicago chapter of the Ubiquitous Voice Society, as well as a frequent speaker at conferences and colleges across the country including SXSW, SpeechTEK, VOICE, Northwestern University, and Columbia. Her book with fellow conversation designer Rebecca Evanhoe, Conversations with Things, will be out on the Rosenfeld Media roster in spring of 2021.

In addition to writing and designing for bots, Diana is a produced playwright and screenwriter who has written and produced for a variety of networks and creatives including Animal Planet and Blue Man Group. She is the co-creator of the web series, The Underlings, and the in-development pilots, Shytown and Automates.

Starting with their own experiences, they end up discussing about the technology which not only is empowering people but also defining new standards for voice assistants.

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Conversation Highlights:

[00:07] Diana's fascinating journey to become a VUI designer

● Diana explains how she got into VUI designing while sharing her experiences of being a health writer.

● She is also writing a book called, Conversation With Things, to explain a practical approach towards VUI. She is co-authoring this book with Rebecca.

● She had a script writing background, both from training as well as from life and work experience.

[05:04] Can 'Conversation Interfaces' benefit industries?

● Diana approaches this question in an interesting manner. Instead of favoring one side, she goes black and white, and explains how it is a use case based thing.

[11:20] Empowering people with technology!

● She discusses the role of conversational designing in empowering the physically or emotionally disabled people. She also touches on the involvement of technology in moving people out of addiction.

● Diana elaborates on the responsibility of the modern day assistants in medicating the people and helping them in many different ways.

[19:02] The Matter of Privacy!

● Since we are having assistants almost everywhere, this creates a question of privacy because some of the people are skeptical about it. Diana lays down some of the powerful points to use these devices with better ethical solutions in place.

● She also explains that it is the responsibility of the whole team to come up with the strategies to ensure the user's privacy, meanwhile speaking about the importance to target the needs of all the users.

[30:51] Is System Persona game changer?

● Diana defines System Person as the most fun part of designing any kind of conversation platform, and touches on the importance of an appropriate persona.

[35:00] How can defining the standards help drive the conversation?

[37:19] How important is context when it comes to designing conversations?

● Diana elaborates on the need for context, and also inculcates the importance of multimodalities in improving the conversations.

Learn more about Diana at

● LinkedIn

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