James Giangola

Google • Mountain View

A simple and beautiful idea, everyday conversation exhibits systematic design features essential for the creation of user-centered dialogs.  This is James Giangola’s disruptive contribution to our industry, a concept he’s rigorously researched and promoted globally.  His rationale for leveraging conversational norms for a superior user experience has meant a paradigm shift with significant design implications for, e.g., dialog architecture, prompting, prosody, who we hire as voice actors, how we work with them, and corporate branding — not to mention a reexamination of the design process itself. Linguist on the patent “VUIs with Personality” and co-author of Voice User Interface Design, James is now Google’s Creative Lead for Conversation Design and Persona Direction…and still aspires to play percussion in a salsa band.