about eig

We Know Conversational Interfaces

Let’s think about those interfaces. We learned how to converse without much effort. How hard can it be? It certainly can’t hard to teach a machine the art of conversation, especially now that we have artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language understanding (NLU), right? Unfortunately, experience demonstrates that it’s harder than you might expect.

Creating a good spoken interface seemed particularly difficult in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It had never been done before! What were the guidelines? The best practices? In those days, the designs treated all users as first timers and, well, not very clever first timers at that. Without guidelines or best practices, those early touch tone and speech systems were error-prone, complicated, and windy. Fortunately, things have improved.

For over 25 years, EIG has steadily advanced design practices by conducting research, documenting best practices, and providing training for thousands of designers. We even wrote the book. Well, really, two books. With the arrival of conversational assistants, we’re continuing our long-standing commitment to research, best practices, and training.