(upbeat music)
- Hey everyone, I’m Leslie Garcia-Amaya
from the Google Assistant Partnerships team.
In my role, I sit at this unique inflection point
between partners who want to connect with their customers
through voice technology
and product and engineering leaders who are building those voice experiences.
Now, I'm lucky because I get exposure
to all kinds of leaders both in and outside of Google.
But today I wanna shine a spotlight on the women who are building
and influencing the future of voice AI.
In a little bit, you’ll hear from my colleague, Lilian Rincon,
Senior Director of Product Management for the Google Assistant,
and talk about how she thinks
about weaving product inclusion into the Assistant.
But to start off
let's talk about how voice adoption is growing.
This is a really exciting time in the history of computing.
The Assistant is available on over 2 billion devices
and every month more than 500 million people
are using the Assistant both at home and on the go.
They're using it for routine tasks
like turning on the lights, playing the news, and setting alarms,
as well as easily adding things to their shopping list via voice.
They’re also using it to play games like Wonder Woman Stories,
which launched back in March
in celebration of International Women’s Month.
Whether the Assistant is helping you automate tasks
or staying organized, at the end of the day,
it's about helping you get things done.
But the success of these experiences
depends on a diverse set of voices that are building them.
There are so many decisions that are influencing how users
experience these voice platforms.
So let's look at the women both inside and outside of Google
that are influencing the future of voice AI.
First, I wanna talk about Lilian Rincon.
She’s a Senior Director of Product Management for the Google Assistant leading a team of 30
who are focused on a number of use cases across verticals like communications,
family, meals, and more.
Lilian's life experience
makes her a natural advocate for the AI community.
She grew up in the US, Venezuela, Indonesia, and Canada.
And so an example of this is her advocacy
in the development of Assistant's Interpreter Mode.
It's a real-time translation feature that helps you talk back and forth
with someone who doesn't share your first language.
As an ESL student, Lilian understood firsthand
how hard it was to communicate with others
and is proud of how interpreter mode can eliminate language barriers
for the Assistant's global user base.
Next I wanna talk about Beth Tsai.
Beth works closely with Lilian as the Director of Trust and Safety.
Her team's role is to keep and earn user trust.
They work on developing responses
to some of the most complex societal questions.
One example of this is, Hey Google Don’t All Lives Matter,
to which the Assistant responds
“Saying black lives matter doesn’t mean all lives don’t;
it means black lives are at risk in ways “that others are not.”
Beth is consistently asking herself
whether she's validating or challenging stereotypes
and she asks her team to do the right thing over the easy thing.
Next, I wanna talk about Shikha Kapoor, who’s on Lilian’s team.
She leads productivity for the Google Assistant.
She works on features like Reminders.
She was a part of the team who built the first ever
Google Assistant-powered Smart Display.
Before she joined Google, she grew up in a small town in India
where she had no access to the internet or computers.
Her background informs how she thinks about building
the future of ambient computing.
And she firmly believes that voice tech will remove barriers to the internet
by helping people get information
using their most natural form of interaction.
And then we have Cathy Pearl, Conversation Design Manager
who also wrote Designing Voice User Interfaces
and has spent more than 20 years in the field of voice AI.
She truly is an icon in this space.
Then we have Jessica Earley-Cha and Mandy Chan,
Developer Relations Engineers
who teach developers how to build for the Google Assistant.
Jessica has reached over 132,000 developers
with her educational videos and events.
And Mandy has seen more than 60,000 developers
download her open source projects.
And lastly, we have Sofia Altuna and Karina Alarcon
from my team on the Google Assistant Partnership side.
Sofia is host of a monthly program called Voice Talks
which reaches over 110,000 viewers,
and it brings you updates on the state of all things voice.
And Kari works with third parties like Televisa
and MercadoLibre to surface their content on the Google Assistant.
Kari also has led presentations to Women In Voice in Mexico City.
It is a privilege to work among these very talented women
on the Google Assistant.
These’re just women working at Google.
Let's now turn to other women working in the voice space
at companies outside Google.
So let's first talk about Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek.
Joan has her PhD in Speech Language Technology
and she's the Head of User Research at NLX.
She also happens to be the founder and CEO of Women In Voice
which is a global nonprofit focused on connecting, developing,
and amplifying women working in voice AI.
Joan has a passion to keep women in voice tech
by amplifying their work and their voices.
She's grown this nonprofit to over 20 chapters
in 15 countries in just two years since the launch.
She’s also written for Harvard Business Review
about race and gender bias in voice.
And she holds leaders accountable for incorporating all voices
and how they build in this space.
Now let's go to India and talk about Akanksha Bhasin.
Akanksha is the founder of the Women In Voice chapter for India.
And she's done this all
while pursuing her undergraduate degree in computer science.
She encourages women to pursue careers in voice tech
and she's led over 20 talks about voice AI
which has impacted more than 1,000 people across India.
Another incredible leader in this space is Dr. Andreea Danielescu.
She's a Senior Manager at Accenture Labs
and she's led an effort to create and open source
a non-binary conversational AI called Sam.
Sam was developed using audio data from non-binary individuals,
those that don't consider themselves exclusively male or female.
She's passionate about influencing a future
where voice assistants represent the diversity of its users.
Finally, let's go to Monica Lam and Carla Saavedra Kochalski.
Monica has been a Professor of Computer Science
at Stanford University for the last 30 years.
She's also the Director of The Open Virtual Assistant Lab
which has led an initiative to create Thinkpedia,
which is an encyclopedia of applications for the internet of things.
She's most proud of pioneering an efficient machine learning methodology
for building conversational agents.
Carla is a Senior Director of Enterprise Products at Capital One.
She works on Eno, Capital One’s intelligent assistant.
She was a critical proponent of designing Eno to be gender neutral
in support of creating a banking assistant that works for everyone.
Okay, so I just talked about several women
who are clearly game-changers in the voice AI space.
Let's have a chat with one of those women, Lilian Rincon.
She is a Senior Director of Product Management
for the Google Assistant
and she leads a team whose job it is to figure out
how the Assistant can help users get things done.
This is no easy task.
I work with many of the product managers on her team
and I can attest to the fact that they have a very hard job.
Lilian brings 20 years of experience to the table
having worked at Skype and Microsoft before Google.
And I'm particularly excited to have her here today
because she’s highly respected in the voice industry,
and she’s very action oriented when it comes to product inclusion
and the Google Assistant. Hey Lilian, welcome.
- Thank you, Leslie. I’m thrilled to be here with you at I/O 2021.
- All right. Let’s start with some rapid Q&A.
Sound good to you?
- Sounds great. - Okay.
So first of all, give me one word that you would use to describe the Assistant.
- Helpful.
- Okay, and a feature that you use most often?
- Family Bell.
- There’s definitely a relationship between those two I see.
What about a woman on the Google Assistant team who you admire?
- Sure. Well, it’s been incredibly amazing
to work with so many great women across all different functions
on the Assistant team.
Specifically, I wanna give a big shout out to Francoise Beaufays
who’s a talented speech scientist leading innovative efforts in speech recognition
for both Google Assistant and Gboard.
- We’re so lucky to have Francoise on our team.
She’s extremely talented. I couldn’t agree with that more.
And can you tell us a little bit more about how your team has designed the Assistant
to be inclusive? - Sure, absolutely.
The team’s actually been really committed to designing Assistant with diversity,
inclusion, accessibility in mind from the very beginning.
For example, I don’t think many people know,
people can pick from a variety of voices for Google Assistant
and we don't designate voices as being male or female.
And we also alternate actually between male and female
when you get an Assistant.
We use AI to improve Google Assistant features
for people with speech impairments or other disabilities.
We strive to make Assistant responses culturally relevant and educational
addressing questions that impact people's daily lives.
For example, during the pandemic right at the beginning
we created an Assistant original hand-washing song
and during cultural moments like Black History Month
or just recently International Women’s Day,
with its personality and celebrates diversity.
- I have to say I agree.
I love how the Assistant celebrates these cultural moments.
And a recent discovery that I made, if the audience hasn’t heard of this query,
you can say, “Hey Google who runs the world?” Definitely check it out.
There’s an exciting response coming your way from the Assistant.
Okay, so Lilian, tell me about an example where having women on your team
led to the design of a more inclusive product.
- Sure. Actually, there’s several talented women
on my team, I'm proud to say.
So just to highlight a couple, when COVID first hit,
we saw there were ways
the Assistant could make things easier at home.
One of our PM leads, Christen Duong, and one of her fabulous PMs, Yu Chen Wang,
created a communal speed dial feature
so that, from your Assistant speaker or display,
anyone in your family
can quickly contact your closest family and friends.
Another example was driven by Yash Bhavnani.
She noticed that with so many kids schooling from home
including her own twins, actually, who were in preschool,
that we could create these bells
to help families remember things like online classes.
And this was really the birth of Family Bell.
I personally use this feature every day
to get my kids out the door on time in the mornings.
- Yeah, I agree with you with Family Bell. I feel like it's an Assistant
that's genuinely caring about making sure
that my day kind of tracks the way that I want it to.
So props to Yash and the other women
for initiating the development of these features.
So we’re out of time for today,
but I’d love to hear, Lilian, before we take off,
what is your personal commitment to continue to push for D&I on your team
or in the broader voice community?
- Sure, I'd love honestly to see us continue making progress
on building diverse teams.
We always talk about this. I think it’s important to make sure
that the team working on these products
is representative of the people that are actually using the products.
And finally, personally, I will continue to shine a light
through social media on the Women In Voice doing phenomenal work like yourself.
- Now we’ve heard about several women
that are true game-changers in the field of voice AI.
But the unfortunate truth is that just 22% of people in AI are women.
If we know that diverse teams build better products
and they build them for everyone then how do we tackle this disparity?
I'm not interested in sharing the familiar spiel
that you’ve heard about diversity inclusion.
I wanna talk about how I see it. I have an auto-immune disease
and I've learned the hard way that what I eat truly matters.
It influences how I feel and it influences my productivity.
It's taken me a while to land on the right diet.
And I have to eat a certain way,
not just one day a week, but every day, all the time.
And so looking back, not eating in this healthy way,
it actually compounded things over time
until one day I had a really big problem on my hands.
Now I thought about how this relates to women in AI.
Hiring more women is not just a one-time solution.
You can’t just hire a couple here and there, check the box,
and say, okay, we've hit our targets for the year.
There has to be this steady drum beat and it should feel uncomfortable
to continue hiring people
that look like everyone else on the team just as it was uncomfortable for me
to keep eating the same foods that weren't serving me.
Initially, this took energy. I had to find the right foods,
I had to figure out the right recipes, but after a while, it just became a habit.
I’d ask you to think about, are you letting old easy habits
stand in the way of diversifying your team?
Hiring a diverse team takes work, no question,
but it will contribute to us building better products
and reaching a broader set of users.
And it's also just the right thing to do.
So now let's talk about inclusion. People have to feel like they belong.
Belong. What does that even mean?
I wanna share a story from a colleague that reveals why belonging matters so much.
This was back in 2005, so only about 15 years ago.
My colleague was getting her degree in computer science.
She was one of a handful of women in her class.
And as it happens in classrooms often, she was asked to get into study groups
on a pretty regular basis.
She noticed over time she was never asked
to be in a study group with the other men in her class.
And she was wondering kind of,
maybe I'm not good enough for this program.
Maybe I shouldn’t’ve picked computer science in the first place
and maybe I need to find a program that’s a better fit for me.
She realized that it may not have been intentional
that these men weren’t asking her to be in their study group,
but nonetheless, it still felt isolating
until one day when one of her male classmates invited her to be in his study group,
and it literally changed her trajectory.
She may not be at Google today if this person hadn't taken
maybe what he thought was just a small gesture.
So I’d ask you to think about, what’s the one thing,
what's the one thing you could be doing to be more inclusive?
You don't have to be a manager, you don't have to be leading a large team
to take action.
Because challenges with inclusivity don't only exist in the classroom.
In fact, nearly six out of 10 women
are leaving tech after a decade in the space.
Almost 60% of women are choosing to vote with their feet.
And a lot of this has to do with the fact that they’re not feeling included
in their work environments.
I’d ask you again: What is one thing that you could be doing,
whether inviting the colleague to virtual coffee to hear more about
her story and her experiences or perhaps inviting a woman to speak up
in meetings who you don’t hear from very often?
At the end of the day, taking these actions is not only the right thing to do,
the future of voice depends on it. Thank you.
(upbeat music)