Ep. 251 - Lauren Golembiewski, CEO and Co-founder of Voxable, on the Future of Voice and Wearables

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Lauren Golembiewski, CEO and Co-founder of Voxable. Lauren and I talk about the future of voice and other wearables and the challenges of designing for new technologies and applications. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript with Lauren Golembiewski, CEO and Co-founder of Voxable

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Lauren Golembeski. She is CEO and co-founder of Voxable which is an agency that designs and develops chatbots and voice interfaces based in Austin, Texas, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So welcome Lauren. 

Lauren Golembiewski: Thanks for having me.

Brian Ardinger: Hey I am excited to have you on the show. You and I connected pre pandemic. I had been reading some of your work in Harvard Business Review. You wrote a couple articles, one entitled How wearable AI will amplify human intelligence. And another one more recently called, Are you ready for tech that connects to your brain?

And I thought those articles were so insightful. I want to get some insight into some of the things that you're seeing in some of the new technologies when it comes to wearables and voice and, and things like that. So maybe to kick it off, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about how you got started in this field and tell us more about what Voxable is.

Lauren Golembiewski: Yeah, absolutely. So Voxable is a design platform for teams that want to build better voice and chat apps. We had been consulting in the voice and chat app design and development space, helping companies, large enterprise teams build their voice and chat experiences. 

And then we pivoted to creating this product because we realized that every team, no matter how much they invested in creating a great conversational experience, they still had no tool that was available to them to efficiently build that experience and define it in a way that created a great user experience for their end customers. So that's what we're currently doing today.

And we got into the voice space just by tinkering in our own homes. I was mentioning to you before we started the show that I started the business with my husband who's a software engineer and my background is in product design. And we basically, as soon as, you know, early voice technology had become available to us, we started playing around with integrating it into our smart home devices.

And we realized that in creating our own voice experiences, that this was really going to be the next paradigm shift in human computer interaction. So, we quit our jobs and started Voxable, the consulting business, or what became the consulting business. 

And then, like I said, through those five years, recognizing that the significant problem in the industry is that there's no good design tools. That's kind of our current mission is seeking to change that and to help teams create a better UX in the process. 

Brian Ardinger: That's pretty amazing. My career started back in internet 1.0 in the UX UI design research field and designing for new technologies back then when it was a screen-based kind of thing, it's obviously evolved in that. And you mentioned this term conversational design. Tell us a little bit about what does that mean? What does it entail? 

Lauren Golembiewski: Conversation Design is a new term and conversation designers is a new role that has come about on the market. And these are people who focus on creating that voice or chat experience and defining what that looks like for the end user.

And so just like today, you might have a product designer or a user interface designer. The way that we talked about that role in a voice application or a chat application is just by calling them a conversation designer because they're focusing on the actual substance of the conversation, writing the words that will be said, be spoken by, for example, an Alexa skill or sent through a chat bot in a chat application. They're dealing with those substances as opposed to, you know, HTML CSS that a web designer would be considering or iOS framework that a mobile designer would be considering. And so, a conversation designers are focused on affordances of conversational experiences, which includes synthesized speech. 

It includes new conversational AI. So that would include something like natural language understanding, that can now take the natural words that a user says and translates that into something a machine or an application can actually do something with and can perform actions based on a more natural interaction.

And so, these types of affordances are what conversation designers become experts in, and then can craft these experiences that help fulfill the end user's goal, whether it be getting help, they have a support issue in, you know, your product. And that's one big place that people are automating these types of interactions is on customer support chat.

As well as, you know, people want to be able to speak to their mobile device and they want to be able to play music and perform actions without having to use their hands. So, whether that's on a mobile device or on one of these smart speakers. And I think the other really big sector that this is exploding on is in the wearable markets because now not only do we have like a smart speaker that's sitting in a room or a personal mobile device, but we now have a kind of always on piece of personal accessorizing that people are wearing almost throughout the entire day. 

And it's like a whole other channel through which conversational interaction can happen. And it can be both very personal and on consumer level interactions where I'm playing music or tracking my fitness. Or can be on a very enterprise level where I'm trying to automate certain parts of my job and do my job more intelligently by having an assistant that can kind of help me do that on the go, either hands-free or site free. 

Brian Ardinger: One of the things that the whole field is still fairly new and it's fairly new, even for the user to understand, you know, obviously a lot of people use the Alexa to ask, you know, what the weather's going to be. What are the core applications that you are seeing that are really having an impact in this new field? 

Lauren Golembiewski: So, very similar to the early days of the mobile market, when mobile apps became really popular gaming has established itself as a very early craze. And I think a lot of people are gravitating towards voice only games. And then there is the whole media consumption landscape. 

Podcasting is a very big interest of a lot of enterprises and consumers alike. It's a channel that a lot of people are starting to recognize the value of. And so, creating voice experiences in new places where...