Hello and welcome to voice user interfaces. A VUI is a speech platform that enables humans to communicate with machines by voice. To help you learn how to design voice user interfaces we have Dana Sheahen. Hello. This is a great topic and I’m delighted to have the chance to teach it. VUIs used to be the stuff of science fiction. Movies and TV shows featuring spaceship crews that communicated verbally with their computers seemed fantastic. But that fantastic future is here now. Voice enabled agents are becoming commonplace on our phones, computers, cars to the point that many people may no longer think of these systems as artificial intelligence at all. Under the hood, though, there is a lot going on. Audio sound waves from voice must be converted into language texts using machine learning algorithms and probabilistic models. The resulting text must be reasoned-over using AI logic to determine the meaning and formulate a response. Finally, the response text must be converted back into understandable speech again with machine learning tools. These three parts constitute a general pipeline for building an end to end voice enabled application. Each part employs some aspect of a AI. And that’s why we’re here. In this lesson we’ll go through a VUI system’s overview and talk about some current VUI applications. We’ll focus on conversational AI applications where you’ll learn some VUI best practices and why we need to think differently about user design for voice as compared to other interface mediums. Finally, you will put these ideas into practice by building your own conversational AI application.