I’ve worked on a little bit of everything on Google Assistant.

When I joined in February 2017, the work was largely adding new features. The Google Home smart speaker had launched in October 2016 and we were focused on making the Assistant more capable. I worked on things like routines (“Good morning”, “Tell me about my day”), personal answers (“What’s on my calendar?”, “When’s my package going to arrive?”, “Where did I park?”, “Remember my birthday”), notifications (“What are my notifications?“), and provider selection (“Play music” -> Spotify or YouTube Music?).

After that, I worked on a horizontal framework team, establishing and disseminating conversation design patterns and components. This work involved publishing internal and external guidelines (which I discuss in more detail in my portfolio section on Conversation Design guidelines).

I continued my horizontal work by partnering closely with the engineering team that was building the dialog management platform. My work helped to ensure that platform supported the various dialog capabilities teams would need to build, launch, and iterate on their features. For example, I designed the global functionality for handling datetimes, dynamically presenting lists in voice or GUI depending on user context, and resolving ambiguity using an “assume, confirm, ask” strategy.