Alex Castrounis and Kim Harvey, a voice designer at Google, discuss the field of voice design (aka conversation design). Voice design topics discussed include the current state of the field, speech parsing and the goal of understanding, phrasing of questions and responses, conversation error handling, human assumptions and expectations around machine personas, the hype vs reality of assistants, potential impacts of AI on voice design and its future, and the combination of linguistics and design principles to better understand how conversations work.