EVENTS: Designing A Feminist Alexa (Tues); Microsoft AI Workshops
Webinars of interest for those working with voice / AI
After yesterday’s letter looking at the impact of Amazon’s voice assistant on people actually named Alexa, we were emailed by a subscriber alerting us to a webinar taking place Tuesday (TODAY) in London (1 PM there / 8 AM Eastern) called Designing A Feminist Alexa - An Exercise In Empathic Design.
We’re passing on information about this free webinar, along with an entire slate of Microsoft-sponsored AI workshops (see below), and will continue with our usual daily letters for paid subscribers tomorrow.
Designing A Feminist Alexa: An Exercise In Empathic Design
August 25, 2020 - 1 PM London time, 8 AM Eastern time
Presented by:
Verena Rieser (Professor of Conversational AI at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh, Scotland) and co-founder of Alana)
Mark West (Education Specialist for UNESCO and author of landmark publication I’d Blush If I Could, which is the first in-depth UN examination of the gendering of AI technology.
Fiona Linton-Forrest (UX Writer for the BBC, working on its Beeb voice assistant)
The description of the webinar:
Chatbots and Personal Intelligent Assistants (PIAs), such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, are increasingly present in our daily lives.
This talk will look at the potential societal impact of anthropomorphising these new technologies. We will focus on their frequent personification as an obedient female and their inability to respond constructively to abusive language as a way to explore gendered AI.
We will bring together interested members of the general public to design a more inclusive bot by inviting attendees to submit drawings of how they envision Alexa’s physical embodiment via a drawing challenge. The outcomes of this activity will inform research funded by the UK Research and Innovation council.
Meanwhile, as mentioned in this blog post, Microsoft, along with their partner Zammo, are hosting a slate of conversational AI workshops that are free and open to the public.
Each workshop will dive into specific conversational AI use cases tailored to each vertical - all are great opportunities to connect with customers in that industry as well.
- Government: Cities and Counties - August 26th
- State Government - August 27th
- Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) - September 2nd
- Higher Education - September 3rd
- K-12 Education - September 9th
- College Students - September 10th
- Justice & Public Safety - September 16th
- Travel & Hospitality - September 17th
- Retail - September 23rd
- Conversational AI Practice - September 24th
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