I’m All Ears #8: Interview with Jason F. Gilbert

Benjamin McCulloch
2 min readApr 9, 2021

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An image that reminds me of Blade Runner, which Jason references at the end of the interview
Photo by Aline Kircchinbauer on Unsplash

Last year I interviewed my friend Jason F. Gilbert to discuss his approach to conversation design.

As I’ve tried to get my head around this whole new area of design Jason has been a wonderful inspiration. He’s generous with his thoughts and advice, and hilarious too. I’m so glad I recorded this.

As the interview was recorded last year Jason talks a lot about Anna — the bot he was designing at CoCoHub. Anna is one of those designs that I feel every conversation designer should study and learn from — a bot that’s been developed over decades, is the “world’s first transgender bot” (she was originally called “Alan” in honour of Alan Turing), and who has been developed by a large team of scriptwriters, psychologists and AI experts under the guidance of Yaki Dunietz. If you want to talk to Anna reach out to CoCoHub — the link’s on this page.

Since we recorded this interview Jason has moved from CoCoHub to become a Character Designer at Intuition Robotics.

In the interview Jason gives great insights into various stages of the conversation design process, but I feel his thoughts on personas as well as testing and updating designs after deployment are pure gold for conversation designers.

The interview

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Benjamin McCulloch
Benjamin McCulloch

Written by Benjamin McCulloch

Conversation Designer (with audio super powers)

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