The Future is Spoken is excited to present Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek as this week’s guest. As many listeners will know, Joan is the founder and CEO of Women in Voice, an international organization she created to empower women and minority genders in voice technology. Joan is a data-driven and human-centred linguist and researcher based in Seattle, USA. She brings an impressively diverse range of skills and abilities to her work. Joan has experience with leadership, management, technical, development, and marketing roles. She has conducted research and voice/multimodal design work for more than seven years, visual graphic design for nine years, and has also analyzed languages for almost two decades. These credentials make Joan the ideal guest to explore the power of conversational design. Joan believes the future of voice tech will be multi-modal. Voice tech will be a space where we engage technology, not just with our voices, but with other senses too, such as our hands. She gives the example of ordering a pizza, which can be more complex than it sounds, given the range of menu options. A user might speak to a chatbot when placing an order, while selecting toppings from their smartphone screen. This makes complete sense, given the complexity of some voice tech conversations, and the current limitations of voice interfaces and chatbots. In this episode, Joan gives a broad exploration of conversational design, how conversations are developed in different industries, and her motivation for the creation of Women in Voice. This is a fascinating episode exploring so much in the voice tech world! Enjoy!