LCL Technical: TECHNOLOGY JOBS - LSA Symposium 2021 session 2 of 3

[Music] So we've got three panelists today who are going to talk about uh uh their jobs in voice user interfaces, conversation design, conver discourse and so on. uh my let me introduce myself and then we can uh Chris will say something about himself and then I'll go through some of the same points that Alex was um making in the first part of this panel where we were talking to people from the government sector and this time we're talking to people in industry and so on. So hi Bril I can see you is that am I saying your name correctly? You are nice to nice to meet you. So let let's let you go first and give us a one or two minute summary introduction to you what are you doing now and you know job title where did you go to school very brief and then we'll come back and circle on some of these then then let me just say the other two panel I was going to introduce myself too right um I'm Nancy Fishberg I am an independent uh contractor and I'm interested in qualitative uh experiences uh human experiences while using digital products or physical products. And so I do I call myself a user experience researcher and strategist. But I came to I've been in uh industry side of things for since 1985. I think that's a long time. It's longer than some of you have been alive. Oh well. Uh and but it was a hard transition to make because there weren't people ahead of me that I could talk to about how did you make the transition? So that's what you know I have a PhD from University of California, San Diego. I was the first PhD in sign languages. And let me not let that uh hijack the rest of the conversation. I think in a in a group of linguists, we can all accept that it's a a real thing. Um and let me say for Chris. Chris, do you want to get on and say a quick hello and introduce yourself? Sure. My name is Chris Stewart. I work at Google as an analytical linguist in a team that does human computation. um doing mostly automated analysis of large data sets that are annotated by humans, raiders across the world. Um I previously worked as a senior data scientist and a voice engineer at um at Nuance Communications. Um and yeah, PhD in French linguistics from the University of Illinois in 2009 and had a tenure track job, left the tenure track and I've been in industry ever since. And I should mention that even though neither Chris nor I mentioned it earlier, both of us do coaching privately outside of our regular jobs for people who are trying to make career transitions, especially out of academia. So that's that's the commercial. That's over. All right. Now to our panelists. Briel, please talk to us about you. Sure. So I am um a I'm head of product at Botmach. I'll get get into that a little bit more later. Um, I got my I got two undergrad degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder. One was in linguistics, which was really kind of an afterthought, and one was in neuroscience. Um, really with the intention of going to medical school after I grew up in a family that was very STEM oriented. Um, and I I really wasn't able to visualize a path towards success other than medicine based on kind of the environment I grew up in, even though I realized in high school I loved linguistics. So, I started I I added a ling minor as a sophomore in college um here and there convincing my parents like don't worry, this is just like a fun thing on the side, like don't stress out. And then by senior year, I had taken so many lane courses that, you know, all I needed was like a two classes in another language to get um, you know, to make it a major and get a degree. So that's where I found myself. Um, and long story short, I was so unaware of this world when I did graduate. Um, the only thing I had ever really heard about the world of like tech or industry or a a linguistics linguistics opportunities um that weren't in academia were my best friend who had always been kind of an artist. Um, my parents saw her kind of path through high school and college and they were like, you know, she's great, she's like doing her own thing, but you need to stay focused. and she ended up getting an amazing internship at Spotify as a designer um during college and and then you know worked at um startups and now she's at Snapchat as a designer and so it finally opened my eyes to this idea that creatives can you know forge their own path in this world and um she had been like sneakily sending me linguistics uh like analytical linguist job descriptions from Google over the course of my senior year and trying to say like, "Hey, this is a thing. Like, you can do this." And I was like, "Cool, sounds good, but now I'm going to stay focused." So, anyway, long story short, um I I realized as a senior like this isn't working for me. And luckily, I had been a living nanny at that time, so I didn't have to move home after I graduated. and I kind of just threw myself into learning everything I could about UX, UX design, what this new space of voy design was and um started working at a very small startup and that was my kind of um foot in the door and okay so we're hold on to that one we're going to talk about how you got to that first job but so say so you're now working on voy design expand that because I'm not sure everybody knows the pronunciation voy design voice user interface design. Um, my and sorry, I wanted to cut myself short in case I'm taking too much time with this intro, but um, yes, I started as a a voice user interface designer at a very small startup. And, um, there's two people. It was really me and my boss. So that was my first realization that you know this world of startups exists and um you know really starting to finally reach out and I actually had reached out to an uh during that summer asking her like hey what do you do? I'm really just trying to find people that are in this world and because I don't really know what it means to be an analytical linguist at Google. I don't I don't really know what it means to be like this in the real world. So I was um Okay, that's a great segue where we can get a quick introduction to Ann and come back to you. How about that? Thank you so much. So I want to introduce you all to Ann Gobble and and you're going to correct me on pronunciations also. And this is by linguists. Yes, that's the only time I would do that. And so uh you were in this before was in it. I was. And so tell us the quicky introduction and then we'll go deeper. Sure. The quicky introduction is that I also came out of UC San Diego grad school. Um and like me, not like like you. Exactly. Um um but we did not overlap. But because I'm so old. Yeah. I'm not spring chicken either. [Laughter] But any case um yeah so I um had my degree was in linguistics and cognitive science because of the UCSD um cogsai program which is you know people are in all these different departments and which is a fantastic place to get into this kind of work that we're all uh interested in. Um and the thing is while I was in grad school um I was a foreign student because I was born and raised in Sweden. So it was I was kind of limited on kind of work I could be doing for money while I was a student. But my adviser who was a phonetician said, "Hey, um ITT um they're they're doing all this work on phonetics. They're doing this phone marking on because they're developing a speech recognizer and you want to do that?" I'm like absolutely it sounds great. So that's kind of how I sort of went started down this path and um then I did a similar job for another u startup before I finished and then it was kind of the natural easy choice then to just kind of go that way. So and you liked it. I mean and I don't know if you were here to listen to the first part of the the government part of the panel but one of the things that people advised the panelists advised was do something you like. Yes. And that uses your skills. So it's not just that you did you found that job and poof, there was a path for you, but you really liked it. Anyway, that's exactly it. Like like you mentioned earlier, Nancy, it was the um I had found out about uh linguistics from from somebody went to UCLA when I was, you know, in in college and what is this linguistics thing, you know? Yeah, I need to find out because I came from a family that was very much into language and so on. So it's kind of a natural like, well, this is cool. I wonder what I can do with it, but I'll worry about that later. So, so that's how I got started. And then I've, you know, just a briefy one is that I've kind of been at various kinds of companies, big and small, new ones like many people. Um, Amazon, uh, now I'm at a small startup. And I like both of them, both types of jobs for different reasons. We can go into that more. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a nice theme that we can pursue in a few minutes after we meet our third panelist who is Greg Bennett and I think I know how to pronounce his name because it's pretty pretty regular in the greater Anglo-Saxon area. So, Greg, tell us about you. And you came out of the G a Georgetown program. I'm not sure if it was the same one. Let's see. Kyle, go ahead. There you go. Um, so I, yes, I attended Georgetown for undergrad and grad and, uh, focused in applied linguistics and social linguistics because at the time I couldn't really sort of make up my mind between language teaching and, uh, discourse analysis, interactional social linguistics. Um, so I did a bit of a fuse of the two. Um, and technically my degree is in applied linguistics because the applied linguistics concentration at Georgetown allowed for a lot more of flexibility um to you know spend time in the social linguistics area as opposed to had I done the socio concentration I wouldn't have been able to do quite as much of the language uh pedagogy course work. So I I did that work actually my first exposure to industry was while I was at Georgetown in graduate school. We had a research assistantship for a project through DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Um, and that was really sort of my first exposure to doing research for a product. So what does it mean to understand a particular interaction or users for a given uh you know at the time it was a video game that we could potentially develop into an experience and at that time I didn't even know what user experience was um I I was just like okay well these people tend to do these things and so we should make the product do you know X in order to accommodate that. Um I took a year off after grad school to kind of do the whole find myself California yoga granola hummus um journey as it were which was hugely valuable. Um spent some time teaching um ESL because I didn't really do any teaching as part of my graduate work. I only did research assistantships. And then u you know of course our um guardian angel as it were Anna Marie Truster reached out to me and was like hey I heard you're in the Bay Area. Microsoft is looking for a researcher who knows something about conversation and ethnography. And I was like Microsoft knows what those things are and cares to hire somebody who like specializes in that. So I was like sure why not? And at the time I didn't even have a resume. I just had my CV and I the email actually had come from you Nancy um that you had said the email to Anna and at the time we didn't know each other. I was just like okay well maybe the hiring managers will think I'm legit if I attach this entire email thread to my response. Oh did you? So I did I forwarded the whole thing. I was just like maybe they're going to know somebody here because I don't know any of these people. And then I attached my CV because I didn't know any better and was like, "Hey, I don't know if you know, you certainly don't know me, but you might know one of these people. I'm interested in the job." And that's actually what got my foot in the door. They were like, "Oh, I know Nancy." Um, Lisa Peasson was actually the person hiring. So, um, and like they all they did was read maybe like the first page of my CV. So, of course, like they didn't know anything about what I did because the first page of your CV is just like where you went to school, right? Um, and so when I got in the interview room, that's when I found out it was the project they were working on was Cortana. Um, they did offer me the role after I explained to them the kind of work that I did at DARPA. And, um, once I got in the role, that's when I had the great fortune of working with Lisa Peasson, who took me under her wing and taught me what UX was. And once I figured out what user experience was, that's when I realized, okay, actually the jump from social linguistic research to user experience research actually is not that far. It's just a matter of figuring out what user experience calls these research methods instead of social linguistics. And at that point, that's when Nancy, I sought you out and had a right, we had lunch, we had lunch at Yahoo. Um, at the time, I ended up moving to Yahoo from Microsoft. And I was like, "How do you talk about tokens when you're talking to non-llinguists because I don't know what I'm going to do about this?" And it was great. You facilitated me like a user researcher and it was wonderful. Um, and then at once I so I I ended up at Yahoo because I wanted to see, okay, am I really interested in user experience or am I really just interested in tech? Um, found out that I preferred user experience research to search relevance, which was what I was doing at Yahoo. Um, I got connected to someone at Salesforce through a Google group um called uh design user research, which is pretty popular. Everybody, I think uh is is on there um for a contract role um that had been filled, but then they were saying, "Hey, if you're interested in a full-time role, um that might be opening up in a couple of months." So, I stayed in touch with the hiring manager, reached back out to them once I saw the full-time role for a user experience research role, um, and then said, "Hey, would you be willing to refer me?" Um, and that she was, uh, very luckily, and that's what got me into the interview room. As soon as they submitted the referral, um, the following day, I got a call from the head of research for an interview. Um, three days later, I was interviewing and then another couple days later, I had an offer. um started out I've been at Salesforce for five years. Um Wow, that's great. Yeah, it's been a I can't I did not expect to be here this long if I'm being honest. Um I started out as a user experience researcher working on the flagship salescloud product. Um and the entire time I was working on research for their AI products which at the time were more fledgling. Um, and then I moved over to the ServiceCloud product, which is for their customer service industry to work on the Einstein bot builder because that's when I found out that we were going to produce a chatbot builder. And as soon as I heard that, I was like, "Everybody out of my way. I want to research that." All right. I'm here to help. Yes. And that's I'm not from the government. I'm from Salesforce. Yes. Exactly. Um, and that's when I started moonlighting as a conversation designer, offering uh because everyone on that team really wanted advice like how long should the pause between turns be or uh how do like how do we organize the intents or you know how do we frame the conversation? And I'm like a I can't believe you're using these words, b I can absolutely help and c let's go. Um so, uh I did that for I think two and a half years until the demand for conversation design resources like actual design assets really hit a fever pitch and I sort of seized that moment to um essentially found Salesforce's first official conversation design department and so now I run that. That's very fun. and how many conversation do you have anybody reporting to you or do are you a loose matrix of people? I'm sorry I'm going on beyond this intro thing and uh so let's hold that question for just a minute because I want to draw attention to a couple of themes and Kyle if we can have all three people on with me at the same time. Can you highlight all three and then we can go back and forth and have more like a real conversation and Kyle doesn't have to do so much work. I don't know if he's even listening but we can hope. Um, I'm hearing two themes that I know we want to come back to besides the content of your actual day-to-day work. And I'm talking to all three, Bel and an and Greg. And that is this business about startups versus big companies. And I think there's a very interesting interplay with some questions that are coming in the Q&A uh which is about visas for people who are not US citizens getting jobs with US companies in US locations and how do you negotiate that, right? And so I hope that we will all uh be able to talk about some of those things as well. Uh, so if you haven't already told us about your first job after graduation and so Greg, you're holding, you've got one marker in the parking lot, right, that you're going to tell us about this. Uh, do you report to people? Is there a conversation design group, an affiliation group, you know, uh, and there's lots of ways that organizations can handle it, and I'm curious about how so Salesforce is doing it now. But let's we're almost there. I see two of us and we're going to have two more coming in. One. Okay, good. Then two. Good. Okay. If you haven't told us about your first job after grad school. Oh, sorry. I don't mean after grad school. I mean your first job outside of academia and that transition. I'd like to hear from any of you that hasn't. I think we sort of heard from Bil if you have something more about that one. And uh Ann, I don't know if you kind of you you sort of jumped into it, but you didn't really give that that detail about how you made those connections. Sure. Was Peter Benson involved? Not at that point. Uhhuh. Okay. There's a name I haven't heard in a long time. No, you're right. Actually, he was there. That's right. He was there. That's right. Yeah. Um Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, so I mean, I kind of hinted at that that it was sort of a a slide into it. Um even though I think still I am kind of at heart more of a sort of researcher like I mean academic on some level but sort of practical academic right because I don't want to just sit and do theory I want to sort of apply it but I also really want to get at the underlying like really how how does this stuff work you know and all that kind of stuff right so it has to it's always this balance of finding you know how do I do the stuff that's actually real data and reality that can be applied and you know that kind of But yeah, so that's how it started. I I um started just doing this phonetic the phone marking. Um and then as I was finishing up getting closer and closer to finishing grad school and being there on a student visa, I'm thinking what am I going to do next? Yeah. And uh don't want to go down the path of of uh of academia or not. And I got this other similar job for another startup in San Diego that um started as all also started out as doing phonetic marking of stuff but then kind of went into other things. Um and it was a small R&D company very language and speech focused and uh they kind of survived by um getting small business grants mainly from different sources NSF you NIH DoD you know take what you can get. So I was doing that for quite a while and that turned into a real job. Then after I finished I'm like okay you're doing my stuff I'm sticking with you you know there comes your visa tie in you know um and uh then I worked there for quite a few years until it kind of folded for various reasons and that's when I went to nuance because a friend again it's the connection stuff a friend who knew somebody else who like hey why don't you talk to so and so she's at nuance why don't you talk to her she does your kind of stuff and then that then that's how it it's absolutely So you cannot underestimate those personal contacts and I feel also like that taking that step of actually saying yeah sure I'll do that phonetic marking stuff the during grad school if I hadn't done that I have no idea where I would have gone I guess that was the first step into that path thank you okay does anybody else want to say more about their their initiation into the world of nonacademic work you're okay trying to initiation stuff I actually want to hear more about uh the the advertisement for this group which is about technology and phonetics. But I think you know Greg, you're the furthest from phonetics in some way except for that stuff about how long should the pauses be between uh between the question and waiting for the answer. Are you still there? Should I wait for you? You know that one, right? But uh Brill, I think you and Ann both can talk to that more. and Ann, I hope you give an advertisement for the upcoming book. So, Bri, so yeah, um I I think Ann really is the expert on this one. Um I don't have any advanced degrees, so everything I know about linguistics, I was trying to pack in in college between premed coursework and neuroscience. Um, I wish I could have gone a lot deeper because I I and and I think that's one of the reasons I consider going back to school in the future because I kind of feel like my linguistics education was rushed. All I knew is that I had like this weird inexplicable passion for learning about it and like trying to teach my friends about it, but I just I wish I could have gone much much deeper. So um I do know that when I w when I did start as a as a voice user interface designer um sometimes uh I would get to draw on that uh that knowledge when for example helping a client pick a name for their like Alexa skill. So um in my last startup we were a product company but also kind of trying to get off the ground by doing a bit more agency type stuff. So um our promise was that you come to us we will help you think up a good use case to bring your brand or your company to a voice uh user experience probably accessed via Google Assistant or Alexa at that time. And then um and we would basically bring them through the uh we would really take on a lot of that process. So it wouldn't be like a normal, you know, graphic design agency situation where the client already kind of probably has an idea of what it should look like and feel like because these experiences on the smart speakers are so new. So, we would really take um we would really kind of drive the whole thing and help and I remember helping a client pick um the name that he was going to launch on Alexa with and explain explaining to him like what makes a good name and what doesn't because it has to be easy to say. Um the phonot tactics have to be just so um you it has to be memorable because it's not right there in front of your eyes like uh a visual interface is. Um it you obviously want it to somehow reflect your brand. Um, but yeah, I remember being able to explain a little bit about like why this name wouldn't be such a great idea because of this reason um the phenology of this versus this. and he responded like he was interested but I was like okay I'm actually maybe in the future I'll still because I gave him like two paragraphs like of hardcore linguistic reasoning and he was like okay just tell me what I should do. So from then on I was like I'll just think about it on my own and then I'll sort of give like the two sentence reasoning from now on. But you know you can back it up with all kinds of other stuff if anybody tries to tries to Right. Yeah. Right. If they push back, we've got the we've got the the rationale. Right. Right. Great answer. Thank you. I appreciate it. And tell us more about H about your stuff and about the content of your work in the past few years. Sure. Um, so of course what you see and and you probably if you're around people doing this stuff at all, you see a lot of people who come through the the nuance doors because there's a we like to refer to as the nuance mafia. We kind of tend to stay in touch and we show up all over the place, right? Because the thing is nuance um u was and is a place that of course does um work for call center phone stuff. the things that people love to hate, right? Which is far from the press or say one that people like to point to, which is just if you do that, you just have other problems, right? That is not what good voy design is about for those things or anything else, right? But the thing is about working in that space is that we were kind of limited in many ways. And I'm I'm very glad that I went through that because um when I started it was a small company and um which means everybody kind of had their fingers in a lot of things. So I got a lot broader experience than people even who started there a few years after I did got a chance to do like writing grammarss and things like that which is really cool because as somebody who's interested in linguistics right you see exactly what happens you know it makes you understand you know you have to think about both what the user does what's easy and hard for the user and what's easy and hard for the computer and how do you get these to talk to each other right in ways that work for everybody and uh and in a way it was actually easier back then than it is now when some of the technology is further ahead. I mean in terms of recognition and things like that but most people don't get the opportunity to get that close to actually messing with the with the details right so um and um then so I went from there uh after many years I went to uh Amazon lab 126 before Alexa came out um as I was working on things related to that and then I got lured away to another startup like went to small to big to small Um because I really do like I call that my yo-yo career. I do that too. Right. Tiny little company. Big company. Yes. Exactly. And and they're good. You know, like we mentioned, pros and cons of both. Um I kind of like the smaller companies because of the chance the opportunity if you if you're working with the right people, you have a chance to make more of an impact sometimes and again you get closer to the details of the you know where you can mess with stuff. Uh but that's not always true, right? I mean it all depends on the details but uh I went to a place where we were doing a um a multimodal app for helping people prepare for um medical procedures and u but it had you know a speech component to it you know and brought up some really interesting questions linguistically in terms of what do you do especially in a field like health right I mean now you can't just say oh oops I gave you the wrong song right oops I gave you the wrong medical advice oh darn right? I mean, that's just isn't going to fly. So, it's a whole different level of of tricky to do it then. And how do you confirm that you actually heard the right thing and you're still being helpful? And sometimes you might have, you know, other forces in play that, you know, like well, you know, business rules, blah, blah, blah. You know, that's always a fun one. But, um, so, but that was a really really interesting job. And what we did there also in terms of fanatics and and so on. And to piggyback on what B said, we actually had, we were trying to come up with names for our own products and we actually did some tests with, you know, naive listeners where we had a whole little thing set up or playing bunch of names and see what people remembered and why and figured it out that way how to how to name stuff. So that was that's another place where just suddenly the whole background of you know linguistics and phonetics popped up. Right. Um. Right. And and you didn't choose to hire in Laurel or her company which specializes in naming. Well, small poor company, right? Exactly. So sometimes you got to use these skills in other ways, right? Exactly. You probably didn't follow the process she would have followed, but you got there and you felt confident that the linguistic knowledge you were bringing to the problem of the brand name would be sufficient. It it helped in that context. Exactly. So, right. And then I went to there from there to Denon which is audio equipment company that makes very nice speakers and so on. And I was there with a group of people some of them were from the ones and we were working on doing speech stuff there. Um that was pretty cool until they decided not to do that. And now I'm for a startup doing a little um radio thing, little speech radio thing. I've been there for since the beginning of the strange year that we just left. Um and um yeah, and then my said my spare time I'm trying to finally finish this book that I've been working on with another ex nuance person on uh mastering voice interfaces which is talking about a lot of these things like how do you get people to work together to get a good product? You know your linguists, your developers, your marketing business people. So good. Okay. Um, and so Greg, now tell us a story except you got to come off mute. Any story at all? No. Well, either you tell us tell us one of these stories about, you know, your day-to-day life. What are you really doing? Or or pull the placeholder out of the parking lot. Sure. Probably address the two of them together. Uh yeah. Uh so I think my my day-to-day really is sort of zipping about the company and chasing down any experience that involves conversation. Um and making sure that anyone who's working on it can understand the linguistic stipulations around making a a choice about language. So that can range from anything to are we going to, you know, like put a period at the end of our sentence or an exclamation mark for the conversation design that we're putting in for this textbased chatbot. Or it could be um we want to uh interpret salespeople's sales calls and figure out if they're going well or if they're not going well. Um okay, that's great. But, you know, if you're doing this based on to keep it in within the realm of phonetics, um, you know, if you're doing this based on pitch and we know that certain conversational styles have a higher pitch or a greater um, intensity perhaps than the data set that you're training on, then now all of a sudden you've introduced a bias into the system and any salesperson who talks loudly um, is now all of a sudden negative um, and that impacts their job. So, you know, making sure that teams are aware of this. Um, I'm not a phonetician. Um, but I do know just enough phonetics to be dangerous and to be a real pain in the you know what for our uh engineers and data scientists whereby I've gotten in lengthy arguments in front of executives. Um, where I will Yes. um where I will go to bat for the sake of you know phonetics where I'm like I'm sorry but just because and and really I think from the angle of socioetics again I'm not a socioonatician and I do think sociopathicians are a real value ad to this space so if you are a socioonatician I highly encourage you to think through um moving into this space or the intersection of voice or conversation design and ethics ethics is the hot word they like to use in the industry. I hate it. Um but because I don't think it's accurate, but that's what they like to um use for uh you know, equity and equality. Um and so for that sake, I will go to bat and say something like, well, hey, just because you can predict the v the length of a vocal of given vocal tract given the pitch value for a sound does not make that person male or female. Um, and that's like one of the proudest things I've ever done at Salesforce where I'm like, "Uhuh, no, honey. We're not doing that." Um, good. Thank you. So, let's let's all join in and do that together. Yes. Yes. Um, and then in terms of my uh like team and whatnot. So, I'm not hiring at the moment. I don't have any direct reports. It's more of this like dotted line matrix. And by dotted line I mean that person the other people who work in in relation to conversation design with me now have direct managers who are not me but that they their work very much is in line with my space. Um so I'm hoping to kind of grow that um over the next year in hopes to actually like hire direct reports and grow that team. Cool. That sounds great. Let's see. We've got I think a representative of each. So I think that we I don't know whether we have to talk about this at all. That is we have one person who got two bachelors, one person who got a master's and one person with a PhD. And that was one of the questions that had come up earlier is do I need a PhD? Do I need an advanced degree? And part of what I always say to people is if you want to go to grad school, go because you want to learn something and if you know what you want to learn, even better. uh but don't go to grad school and especially don't pay your own money uh unless you really want to do it. And I think Briel can speak to this that you've gotten lots of uh influence in the field not because of your degree but because of your actions and your ability to draw a group together. So talk about your women in voice uh group that people may want to hear about. Oh okay, sure. Um, so yeah, funny story actually. When I was a junior or in the middle of my kind of like senior year crisis about like am I going to med school? Am I going to like not go to med school? Like what am I what the heck? This is what I've been planning my whole life. Um, I very hurdly got in my application for a um kind of like it was a program that could help me get a master's uh in linguistics with one more year of school. Okay. And I really, really, really wanted this and I felt like it was the right thing to do because it kind of would give me that um one more year to really figure out um if there was a world out there that I could apply my skills in and like a possible career so I wouldn't have to just start studying for the MCAT right afterwards. So, um, I got rejected from that and I'm so glad I did because it still it it just forced me to have this reckoning a little bit earlier. And now I now when I like with a couple years under my belt uh from working um I know so much more clearly what I would want to like go back to school for because I really w there's all these things that I just wish I knew so much more about and that would help me with my job. Um, and honestly I'm learning more every day about other stuff too. Like um over over the last month I uh my co-founder asked me to join our company as a late co-founder which blew my mind and I'm so honored to be you know in this position and it made me realize that I really do love this kind of startup world that I'm in as well. like it's a whole other side to things that I had never even anticipated. So, I love this entrepreneurship thing and I love, you know, business and it's also interesting and I'm still doing, you know, I'm still working with language on a day-to-day basis, but it just opened my eyes to this whole other world as well. So, um, in terms of like the degree, I know now if I go back to school in a few years, what I'd want to do. And when I graduated, um, like I said, I I was living as a, uh, I had my living situation figured out. I was working part-time as a live-in nanny. And then that freed up my other time to really like go all in on finding some kind of um internship or a job where I could just get a bit more experience in this field. And like Greg said, I had also never even heard of what user experience was. So I just for those first couple of months, I like read every Medium article I could get my hands on. I I reached out to people. I probably talked to like pro I probably talked to 50 to 60 people in that summer just to ask them like what they do um and how they started to do it and without asking them for a job right no you were doing informational interviewing which says I'm not asking you for a job I want to hear about how did you navigate this path that I'm having I'm stumbling on exactly because I knew I wasn't qualified for a job yet um I wanted to learn how to become qualified and really I took this tip from um the book design your life and I really recommend that book to anyone um looking to start their career make a change or literally anyone actually just in general it's a great book but um but yeah just reaching out and um trying to create stuff so that's one thing that I realized was so different about this world versus academia was um in acade academia, you really need a lot of experience. You need the credentials. You need like I had worked in a neuroscience lab and I saw the latter like I was like, "Okay, we've got this the head of the lab. She's like the queen bee. Nobody can question her. She's got all this experience and she's like the final word on everything." And then there was the grad student that I was under. And the grad student was like, you know, like we would look up to her and because she was, you know, like she was finishing up and and it was just this whole like you you had no basis to really contribute unless you had already put in the work, put in the time, put in the hours, written um all kinds of papers. And when I started my first job, my boss um he was like, "No, you need to start writing because you have interesting ideas and you just need to put them on Twitter. You need to put them on LinkedIn. You need to you need to get a Twitter first off because I didn't I wasn't really a social media person. Uh and and I was really just using LinkedIn um to find people, not like put anything onto LinkedIn, right? I didn't want to like I I don't like that whole I didn't like the idea of any of that. But he was the one really pushing me and he said you need to use this time to write and read but really put your work out and then um and from there I I was just so grateful to have this opportunity to um learn speak at conferences. Um he he pushed me to to apply to speak at a lot of conferences even though I was like who am I to be speaking at conferences and he was like no you you there are no true experts in the discipline of smart speaker voice design at this moment in time because it's so new and you already have a background in thinking about it. So whatever you submit will be of value to someone. And it just blew my mind that like people would actually listen to me without me having put in the time or the work necessarily, but basically me just demonstrating I want to be a part of this. I'm willing to put in work right now and I have some good ideas that I would like to share with you. So, and I want to underscore what you just said is that you you did put in the time. You're denying that you put in the time, but I believe you put in the time and you did the thinking work to pull these this stuff out of what you had learned from linguistics and attach it to the product world in a way that was that you could talk about. You were self-reflective. So, whatever you're self-reflective about is useful because that's the basis for an interesting conversation with somebody else. So, thank you, Bri. That was great. I like hearing about that. No worries. Next, who who wants to ask one of ask you ask each other some questions and then we're going to get to more of these questions from the audience. And I know that a lot of people are on some of very mechanical things about how do I find an in I say mechanical how do you find an internship and my first thought is be on the right lists. So we mentioned one list but there are many many of ways to find the discussion groups and again LinkedIn is one place where there almost any topic you want to learn about there is a discussion group or a six uh on that topic and so you know being a lurker briefly until you see whether this is what I'm interested in may be the way to go but you may have other um secret sources of postings about interesting internships that I know nothing about maybe you want to name a couple of those. I have a question for Greg which is how much push back do you get? You mentioned you stand up and you know have to say okay fine this is how it works you know you know but how much how much do you feel like the people that you were working with are sort of receptive and you know I think it's a mix um and it depends on what it is that I'm sort of advocating for. Um I think like u you know given what we've been talking about in the chat um that you always have to anchor it in what does it mean for the business? What does it mean for the product? So when it came to for example um the pu you know the the push that I was making regarding gender and um pitch um I essentially said look if we if we do this and overly sub ascribe a gender to a given pitch then we run the risk of misgendering the user and here's what it means for the user experience it means that potentially the voice assistant back when we were working on voice Salesforce is not working on voice at the moment But um back when we were I I said like this could potentially make it a huge usability issue. Um also what does it get us? Why do we need to know their gender? What are we going to do with that information? Also, if we misgender somebody, hey, guess what? Marketing PR, I don't want to be you because you're gonna investor relations. Let's talk about investor relations. Exactly. this could hit us in a really bad way for the optics of the business and we could potentially not just lose business but hurt our overall brand. And I know that at Salesforce brand is extremely important. Um, so making sure to kind of anchor it in those values for the business so that way they can go, "Oh, shoot." And I'm like, "Yeah, so you might want to listen to what I want to say." as opposed to something like for chat where it's like, okay, um I think probably the biggest argument I got into over chat was whether or not our conversation design should spell all right with two words or one word. And I'm like, first of all, people, spelling is a farce. Second of all, um if you're going to impose your fascist spelling ideas upon me, then you better think twice about how I'm going to respond. because I was like I basically was saying like look we're you know I get that all right as two words make sense that's how I spell it too but that's not conversational not how our users do it and if we want to essentially evoke a particular experience or strike this type of tone with the experience then we should make it one word. Um so again trying to sort of anchor it in what does this mean for the experience? What does it mean for the product? What does it mean for the business? Whether that is, you know, this is what users could potentially react to. They might think that Salesforce is stuffy. Do we want that? No. Um or this might be a brand issue. Like is it going to potentially impact our bottom line? Like the money that we could make? Um is it going to bring bad marketing or bad press to the company? All of those I think are great levers to pull um to anchor your recommendations. Great. So, uh, I see in the chat there's a really, uh, active conversation about internships and there's also some several questions in the Q&A about visas. So, I think we should definitely address both of those things. Um, anybody want to start with I'll I'll give a a quicky thing opinion about visas and that is in the in the book What Color Is Your Parachute and the website which is a if you don't know about it already because you've been in academia with blinders on. I suggest you look at the website and potentially pick up the book. It's been in print for 40 years and is revised every year. So, it's not old news. It's just the principles keep getting updated with the new technology and they bring in the technology in but informational interview. What's a resume look like? How do you write a cover letter? How do you how do you create a what they call some places call it a success group or an accountability group? That's a useful thing. But the reason I mention it here is because they say go to a small company first as you're making a transition. That's who's going to have the flexibility. And I think Bel has talked about this where you're going to get to try on a whole bunch of different roles. You'll see which ones you're really good at, which ones you like, and how those things come together. And that will help you to decide what you want to do next. And but at least it gives you a foot in the door. However, if you are not a US citizen and you're trying to get a job at a US startup, they will not have anybody to help you with visa stuff. They don't have that kind of infrastructure yet. And so you're going to need to find people in a visa situation for US employment are going to need to find a company that's large enough that they've got people in the support staff, HR staff who specialize in that and will help guide you and defend your visa status with regard to employment. So that's my quick answer to the visa situation, but I I welcome other points of view and elaborations and talk about internships. And no, not all internships require that you have a PhD. Have you hired interns? Any of you here? Yes. Yes. Okay. Well, so what kinds of interns did you hire? Um well I mentioned this in the chat briefly but um we at my current startup we've hired interns that are in high school uh in college and beyond. So um we as a startup a very small startup we're five people now now six people actually um we don't have the ability to be super picky. Uh we and in fact we really really want people that are generalists versus specialists because in a team of five or six, you have to be able to have every teammate thinking about the whole company as uh you know how how does my role interact with yours? How do I affect their role? And um so yeah, I would say like I've always really been a generalist because I love doing a lot of different things and learning about a lot of different things. And that I think um when I did inter or when I did interview at more corporate companies, I could tell that that's a skill I really needed to um well, I could tell that creating a better narrative about myself was a skill I really had to develop because I was like, I can do product marketing. I can do product management. I can I'm a linguist, too. Here I am. And they were like, who the heck? Like, who are you? Like, what? we don't believe you can do any of this because you're saying you can do everything. And I totally get why they would think that. So, um, for me personally, that's a big takeaway I got from interviewing at corporate places. But at a startup, we really look for people that are like that because we want them to be so interested and passionate about everything really and be able to do a lot of different stuff, right? Cool. Okay, we're getting close to the end of our time. Excuse me. And I'm going to ask if uh you have any last minute things that I didn't ask you about or hasn't been brought up in the chat yet that you definitely want to communicate with the the audience. We've got like 70 people in our audience. We're so excited that everybody's been finding out about the um activities of the linguists linguistics beyond academia sig. So happy to have your closing comments folks. I I would really uh piggyback on encouraging people to reach out to other linguists in that have jobs that are similar to what you might be interested in because like Belle sort of hinted at you know like she reached out to me and you know anytime I think I don't know about other you know subjects and backgrounds but certainly I've never seen a linguist in this field who says oh some linguist I never heard of tried to talk to me and I don't want to not at all like yes come talk to me, right? Absolutely. So, do that because that is so it's invaluable. Definitely should do that. And that's how you find out about what's going on and who knows who and who can recommend what you look at next, right? I completely agree with that. Um I think yes definitely reach out network but also I think like the biggest thing for me that I noticed when I talk to linguists who are currently in academia is I get a sense of um I don't know like unsuredness or maybe I'm not qualified or this isn't for me or I'm not like a 100% a fit or whatever. And I would say um I think it's easy I think within the academy to get a sense of if you aren't if you haven't established maybe a you know uh a strong um you know reputation for a certain thing already or you haven't uncovered absolutely every single rock like we're trained to do when we write a research paper um and acknowledge every little uh thing that maybe is outside of the scope of whatever we've researched. um that I think lends itself to thinking, "Oh, well then I'm not qualified to speak on this thing." And I would say like definitely set that aside. Um you are absolutely an expert in whatever it is that you do. And there's always going to be someone who knows maybe more than you or more than you know uh your peers or whatever. But that might not be the case when you go into an interview room. You know what I mean? Like when I sit in a room full of of other technologists, I'm not a phonetician. No, but I am the person in the room who knows the most about the intersection of phonetics, society, and technology in that room. I may not be the most expert person out there. There are certainly sociopathicians where I'm like, well, shoot, I don't know anything about, you know, uh, pick your particular variant that you want to talk about and have written a dissertation about. No, I don't know any about those things, but I do know enough to be able to guide the product in the direction of our users. Um, so think about yourself as an expert. Um, and if you're not comfortable with that, then just put it on a shelf for a moment and just talk to the people. Um, and it will come out to them that you're an expert. Um, but like yeah, own it. You you know what you're talking about. You certainly know more than the people who you're interviewing with. Um, and I think if you lead with what does this mean for your business? What does this mean for your product? And then you can sort of sneak in little explanations about how you know, you know, that this could potentially result in a positive or negative thing for those those aspects, then yes, that makes you an expert. Fabulous. Thank you. And I'm seeing a lot of plus ones on the chat with with regard to many of your comments here, not just Greg, but the whole group. So I want to thank you all for coming together. And I want to remind the audience that we picked a very narrow segment of technology and linguistics uh to be able to focus on one theme among people who have similar but not identical jobs and domains. We could have picked uh psycho linguistics. We could have picked uh 16 other uh specializations within linguistics and found you three or four people who could talk to how a linguist plays well with game development or with u learning applications or designing video uh systems like like Zoom and you know so we could get a lot of different ways to uh figure out how technology and linguistics goes together and we just told chose is one small segment for today and I appreciate everybody's willingness to jump in here and share your experiences and to be open to contacts from uh the participants in this group the 70 and more people who are here. So, thank you all for showing up and Chris thanks for adding to the chat there and being my backup. I appreciate it. [Music]