The process of teaching our machines to talk is riddled with ethical minefields, both obvious and invisible. It’s also an opportunity for great connection and empathy. Let’s have a conversation about crafting good conversations and conversations for good.
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Deborah Harrison
In 1999 I was working as a book seller when a friend hipped me to the fact that tech companies sometimes hire people to write whole words and even sentences, and pay them for it too. I moved to Seattle and pinballed around the tech grid for a bit until landing at Microsoft in 2004. In 2013, I volunteered to design the personality for Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana, and embarked on what has become an ongoing quest to develop an inclusive, ethical approach to conversational design. I now lead a team of writers dedicated to just that cause: authoring creatively, training deep neural networks to manifest distinctive personas, and articulating what we’ve learned in the hopes that we can make it easier for all of us to design responsibly.
