Past Events 2021

Pitch Reality – Empowering Female Founders through Gamification

Free Webinar with An Coppens – hosted by Nina Neuf

Wednesday, August 25th 

Together with her team, An Coppens, the Chief Game Changer (aka CEO and founder) at Gamification Nation not only identified established rhetorical biases in pitch situations, but they develop a fun and entertaining way to teach, train, and therefore enable women to recognize and disarm them.

In this free webinar, An introduced us to the Pitch Reality – and how to change it for the better.

It’s tool time!

Which programs and applications are particularly well suited to realize or support concrete steps of the VUI development process? How do you visualize designs, how do you organize your daily work, how do you document your coding progress?

Questions upon questions…

In our first Tool Time we wanted to find out which ticks and tools you use in your daily work.

Women in Voice meet Women in Mobility

April 28, 2021

We’d love to link our communities and move them closer together. That’s why we held a joint event for Women in Voice and Women in Mobility. Our goal was to also network outside the own bubble and bring together women from separate fields in an informal setting.

Find our recap here.

Jar of Questions. Topic: Freelancing

April 7 and 21, 2021

In these sessions we answered all your questions around freelancing.

Thanks to our panelists Manja Baudis, Jrene Rolli, Sandra Noa and Romina Pankoke for sharing their stories, impressions and insights into their work.

In case you missed it, here is a little summary sketch (in German).

Working Out Loud Kick off

March 26, 2021

WiV Germany to start Working Out Loud as the first peer coaching program in the community – for the community: 4-5 people. 1 hour per week. 12 weeks. The programm kicked off on March 26 and we are looking forward to hearing about the participants’ experiences.

WiV DE Event: The (non)sense of gender-free in conversational AI, with Marion Mulder

March 4, 2021

Why are all voice devices female? Is that actually a bad thing? And what does this do to/for how we perceive women and gender equality? Is this making an improvement for all of us or should we be concerned? 

Marion Mulder is a Digital Strategist at MuldiMedia and an Ambassador of WiV NL. In her talk she shared her view on GenderFreeTech, and what she has learned from being in tech and diversity & inclusion for years. 

Thanks to Marion for this amazing sessions, and to the participants for such great questions!

In case you missed it: you can find the event recording on Youtube!

Open Community Meeting

January 22, 2021

We started this year with an open community meeting, to show how the chapter is organized, which topics and tasks the organization includes, and who is currently taking care of all of that.

We also looked into how we can shape the community, which new formats and campaigns we could realize, and which possibilities there are to support and evolve – as a community, but also individually in the Voice world.

Thanks for joining!

These were our events in 2020

How Language shapes the World we live in

December 09th, 2020

Anne Linder (VUI.agency) and Laura Grimm (Lautmaler) took us on a journey through the history and findings of Cognitive Linguistics.

Illustrating, how complicated, yet fascinating the interactions of language, cognition and cultural practices are, they showed that we, as conversation designers, need to understand that spoken and written communication implies so much more than putting words into the correct order.

Thank you so much to everybody attending this event and sharing the fascination for language! In case you missed it: view this webinar on Youtube!

Women in Voice @ ALL ABOUT VOICE

November 10th, 2020

It was at All about Voice 2019 conference when we officially launced the German chapter. That’s why we were so excited to be part of this year’s online version of the event as well.

This session was really simply about Women in Voice: what makes our community special, who is behind the German chapter organization and what does it mean to be part of this.

It was so lovely. Thanks to all the participants.

Voice AI with Noelle Silver

September 11th, 2020

We were pretty excited to have Noelle Silver – one of the top AI speakers today – as a guest of our meetup, sharing her experience in Voice AI and voice assistants, her involvement as a judge in the recent Alexa Prize competition, her career journey, as well as the challenges and innovations she sees for the future of conversational AI.

It was a lovely interview and Noelle did not only share a lot of knowledge but also had many tips for all of us on how to start or improve a career, how to deal with speaking situations and how to make working together in teams more meaningful.

Did you miss the event? Here is Noelle’s audio recording!

Thank you so much, Noelle!

Webinar: Introduction to Voice Search & SEO

July 23rd, 2020

How do we search when using voice? Where do the search results come from? How do I optimize my website, skill or action for voice? And what challenges and opportunities does the topic provide from a business perspective?

In this session, Nina Neuf-Kilian and Romina Pankoke gave an overview of the current voice search landscape, looked into how this affects businesses, and discussed why this is such an exciting and yet challenging topic.

Thanks to everyone who joined for listening in closely and prompting great questions!

Interaktives Webinar: Persona Design – Vom Konzept zum Charakter

June 24th 2020

Together with Marie and Laura from WiV Germany we were discussing different aspects of voice and chatbot persona design.

After introducing the theories of the uncanny valley or the cognitive model of prototypes we exchanged our experiences and challenges when it comes to creating a character for a system: What makes a persona consistent? How can we avoid stereotypes? And, on the other hand, add more diversity?

Even though we would not find closing answers to these fundamental questions it gave lots of insights and fresh ideas to face those challenges.

Virtual Stammtisch #2

June 4th 2020

When lockdown just started we already had a session on remote work in times of social distancing. This time, weeks later, we wanted to know: what did we all learn? In an open chat we shared our lockdown experiences, the challenges we were and are still facing as well as the good things that happened during this time.

This gathering was just awesome, with everyone being so open about the good, the bad and the ugly, showing just how incredibly powerful this community is!

Thanks to everyone who made it to our Stammtisch. To definitely be continued!

Webinar: Digitale Räume und Interaktionen

May 14th 2020

We had an exciting webinar: Kyoko Sugisak and Andreas Bleiker talked about “Digitale Räume und Interaktionen” and gave insights into their work on conversational aspects in chatbots.

Focusing on the question if interactions in CUIs should be humanlike they presented the results of their own research on human-human interactions from the viewpoint of discourse analysis – and possibilities to map those to the interactions between humans and machines.

They provided us with an extremely convincing framework based on linguistic principles that lead to a deeper understanding of the challenges we are facing every single day in designing Conversational Interfaces.

First virtual Stammtisch

May 7th 2020

We made it – Our first virtual Stammtisch took place on May 7th! Although we could certainly top it up a notch on the participant’s side, we had the most cozy 2 hours and talked everything from our favorite Karaoke songs (we got it all from Bohemian Rhapsody over Felicità to Keine Sterne in Athen) to challenges of working in a field as new as ours.
As we’re making this a regular thing, be part of some nice after-hours talks every first Thursday of the month!

Online Workshop with Lee Boonstra of Google

April 29th 2020

What an amazing online workshop with Lee Boonstra of Google!  Lee did not only introduce us to using Dialogflow for building Google Actions, she also gave us some insights into her exciting work as a Developer Advocate at Google.

After explaining what Dialogflow offers for different channels, and giving and overview of the latest features, Lee handed over to us: answering all our individual questions, she guided us through the step-by-step instructions to build our very own (and of course WiV related 😉 ) Action on Google.

Women in Voice Yoga Session

April 15th 2020

We had our very first Women in Voice Yoga Session! Tamika made an amazing job introducing the different poses and making sure we were all executing them correctly.

Women from all over the world took part and came to the same conclusion: There definitely must be a follow-up!  So, stay tuned for the upcoming sessions. We’ll let you know via Social Media and our Newsletter.

1st Online Meetup: “Welcome to my Home office”

March 31st 2020

We had such a great time during our very first online Meetup, discussing impressions and challenges that come with working remotely in times of social distancing.

Initially we had planned in-person meetups in Frankfurt/Main and Berlin around that time, but had to cancel them due to corona. We decided to make the best out of this situation and transfered the meetup to an online format.

First Regular’s Table in Munich

February 13th 2020

So happy to see how our Women in Voice community in Munich is growing! There has been a first regular’s table in February and there will surely be more activities as soon as possible.

In the dim light of homely bavarian cuisine, this small but fine round table chatted about experiences in the field of voice from Automotive to Smart Speakers and the passion, joy, and demands for building a WiV community in Munich.

These were our events in 2019

WiV @ Chatbot Summit Berlin

December 14th 2019

We were at Chatbot Summit’s very first explicit voice day to present Women in Voice on stage and as an exhibitor. The feedback we received was stunning and we had lots of encouraging conversations. One of the best parts was to meet Women in Voice ambassadors from the Netherlands. It was so nice to hear their motivations, challenges and plans and we will surely stay in contact to increase exchange across borders.

First gatherings in Berlin

November 2019

We had two in-person meetings in Berlin so far: one was a presentation to introduce Women in Voice and find more people interested in supporting us, and the other one was our first regular’s table. Both events were really nice and it was exciting to meet each other. It was especially interesting to exchange different points of view, not only on the voice field but also on the notion of participating in WiV each of us is having.
To be repeated whenever it is possible to meet in person again.

Introducing WiV Germany at All About Voice Conference

October 13th 2019

This was quite a chapter kick-off at #allaboutvoice in Munich! Thanks to all of you who joined our Women in Voice lunch table! It was just awesome to meet so many inspiring women who are just as excited about starting a new WiV chapter as we are. Also, thanks to 169 Labs GmbH for organizing this event with so much passion and for an amazing lineup of speakers. See you next year!