57: Maaike Groenewege | Linguistics: A Conversation Designer’s Superpower

Maaike Groenewege is passionate about conversation design. It is a profession that is right in the sweet spot of her interests: writing, analysis, psychology, user support, component management, and above all, her big love: linguistics. She discovered conversation design at the start of 2019 and decided to start Convocat conversational expertise at the start of 2020. Maaike loves the hands-on work of building and designing chatbots (and increasingly, voice assistants). Next to that, she coaches content teams that are just starting the big adventure of building their own enterprise chatbots. Prior to founding Convocat, Maaike spent 20 years working as a technical writer, international project manager, and Agile information analyst for companies like Lucent Technologies, Dutch Air Traffic Control, Dutch Bank AMRO, and the Dutch Railways. In this week’s episode of The Artificial Podcast, Nick chats with Maaike Groenewege of Conovcat.ai. Maaike shares her career as a linguist ultimately led her to start her own business designing chatbots and other conversational interfaces. Maaike talks about why she thinks language and linguistics play such a large role in conversation design (and ultimately the future of voice assistant technology), and how in order for the technology to truly evolve the technology will need to be trained on more aspects of natural human language. To wrap things up, Nick and Maaike talk about open AI and how the industry can work towards developing AI systems that are free of unconscious bias. How to contact Maaike: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maaikegroenewege/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/MaaikeGee Learn more about #VoiceLunch: https://register.voicelunch.com/ Follow The Artificial Podcast on: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theartificialpodcast/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/theartificialp YouTube: https://bit.ly/3bC2Sw2 Follow Nick On: LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-myers-0794/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/therednickm Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therednickm/ Join our Artificial Podcaster’s Facebook Group by heading to https://www.facebook.com/groups/artificialpodcasters Want to learn more about how RedFox AI can help give your brand a voice through the power of AI and Voice-First? Visit https://redfox-ai.com. If you or anyone you know is interested in being a guest on The Artificial Podcast send an email to [email protected].