Tonight’s the night! We have our second Transparency Series event, this time on Voice User Interfaces (VUIs). VUIs also go by the more familiar names “personal assistants” or “smart speakers” — Think Siri, Alexa, Cortana or Google Assistant. This should be an exciting event! Voice platforms are still young enough that journalists can have a hand in how our stories are represented and experienced. The team we’ve assembled is extremely talented and has been involved in some of the very best experiments with voice to date.
November 16 2018 from 5-6pm, Brown Institute Space, Pulitzer Hall
Panel Discussion on “Smart Speakers and Journalism” with Joseph Price of Washington Post and Tommy O’Keefe, Vincent Farquharson & Nara Kasbergen of NPR
Registration: brwn.co/voice-talk
November 17 2018 from 10am-5pm, Brown Institute Space, Pulitzer Hall
Workshop on Building an Interactive Story led by Joseph Price of Washington Post and Tommy O’Keefe, Vincent Farquharson & Nara Kasbergen of NPR
Registration: Closed
Our focus will be on the use of VUIs in journalism or storytelling more broadly. On Friday evening we will hear from journalistic organizations at the forefront of experimentation with news delivery through voice interfaces. On Saturday, we will get your hands dirty producing a conversational news product for Amazon’s Alexa platform. This workshop makes extensive use of graphical interfaces for authoring voice interactions, so the “programming” burden is nearly zero. The big question with “smart speakers” is editorial – how do we help people find and engage with journalistic content?