Learn CxD for free (in 2021)

Budget-friendly resources to study conversation design

This article was originally published on Oct 25, 2021 under Moonbay Labs, now called Tako Strategy. Disclaimer: many of the resources listed below are out of circulation, i.e. Botmock, Voice Tech Global, Voice Den, and other resources may be outdated as well.

If you clicked into this article, you might be curious about conversation design. I’m going to go one step further and assume 1 more thing: $500+ CxD courses are not within your budget. I’ve been there, I get it. So, where do you start? Which resources are both reputable and easy to understand?

A bit about my journey

If we’re being honest here (and I always hope to be that online), I couldn’t afford a bootcamp or pay for any resources to transition into this field. When I got interested in Conversational AI, I was working full-time, sometimes overtime, to afford a basic lifestyle in the bay area. For my entire CxD education, I spent a grand total of… $25.97. I guess you could say I know a thing or two about learning on a tight budget. I talk all about how this was possible in the “Hacks To Save Your Wallet” section below.

But if you’re in a hurry and are a student, broke, or someone who wants to simply experience a “free trial” of conversation design to decide if this really is the career for you, you can dive straight into the list of resources I’ve compiled below to help you on your journey.

Let’s dig in.

Learn the Theory 📚

Here are some resources to help you learn the basics of conversation design and get introduced to the Conversational AI space in general. Disclaimer: this list is NOT meant to be comprehensive. I’ve simply listed the resources that worked for me.

Websites

• Google’s Conversation Design documentation: A great introduction to the field, terminology, and guiding principles when designing for voice.
• Voicebot.ai: I love using this website to stay up to date with major news like Conversational AI company acquisitions, new projects, launched products, and all-around great research on the usage of Voice AI. It’s important to know who you’re designing for and they do a great job on collecting that data.
• Houndify blog: Quick, concise, and deeply educational reads. They cover a whole range of topics, so you’re bound to find something in here that piques your interest.
• LinkedIn: Yes, this is a resource. If you’re connected to or follow even just a few industry leaders on this platform, I assure you, you will learn something new or find out about new resources daily!

Medium

• Cathy Pearl, Jonathan Bloom, Karen Kaushansky, Greg Bennett: These powerhouses don’t post often, but the posts they do have online are a must-read for anyone looking to get into the field and possibly even clear up some misconceptions about conversation design.
• Voice Tech Global: The team from VTG has lately been on FIRE with the learning content they’re putting out into the world. Guy Tonye specifically has been producing detailed article-after-article on less written topics in CxD.
• Techire.ai: I live for their “Behind the Bots” series. It’s so fun to read everyone’s stories on how they got inspired to transition into the field.
• More authors to follow: Brielle Nickoloff, Tess Tettelin, Benjamin McCulloch, Cheryl Platz, Maaike Groenewege, Joseph Tyler, Hillary Black, and Julia Anderson.

Extra Reads

• Voiceflow ebook: I had to give this a shoutout for being one of the few FREE books on CxD you can get. It’s clear, easy-to-read, and I’m even featured in there 👀
• This Week in Voice VIP newsletter: From Bradley Metrock, one of the industry leaders to follow. His newsletter is a delight to open and I always learn about new developments in the space.

Meetups

Conversational AI-related live meetups and webinars are what I’ve found to be the most insightful and useful. It’s definitely an issue to try to keep up with all of them though, so here’s a curated list of my personal favorites. (I unfortunately can’t review the ever popular VoiceLunch; no matter how hard I try, the meeting times always conflict with my work schedule since I’m on Pacific Time).

• Conversational Collective: I love these events because it feels like they bring the expert or practitioner straight to you. The topics are closely relevant and they make sure to leave some time for open Q&A. They’ve ended events for the year (2021), but you can always catch past events on YouTube.
• Botmock AMAs: (As if I haven’t already written about how I religiously followed Botmock virtual webinars for almost a year). Seriously. I learn so much from every single event. The thing I love the most about them is how beginner friendly they are, and how casual the vibe usually is (no stuffiness). Still can’t believe I was a panelist for one!
• The Voice Den: These are monthly “happy hour” interactive almost quickfire style interviews with a panel of experts. The guests are some of the best in their respective field and the knowledge they bring is amazing. There’s also a big community vibe, with the chat always being active and friendly.
• Women in Voice chapter events: WiV has resources for every budget, but on top of that every chapter puts a lot of care and energy into their public events, most of which are free. There’s everything from fireside chats and demo presentations to workshops and even hackathons!

Podcasts

I’m not a big podcast person, but the ones I’ve listed below have really stood out to me; they are engaging and are worth a mention. .

• Voice This! Podcast: VTG is seriously out here giving the world GEMS 💎 of educational content and design inspiration. This is my absolute favorite podcast of all time, hands-down. I cannot stop recommending this.
• Open Dialogues (by Open Dialog): A newer podcast, but filled to the brim with insights already. My favorite episode so far is Episode 3, with Rebecca Evanhoe. Always interesting to get an inside look at how a designer’s mind works!
• The Conversation Design Podcast: The speaker line-up on this one is simply phenomenal. I appreciate their dedication to hosting a diverse range of voices in the world of Conversational AI.
• VUX World: Also a website with in-depth industry articles, these live sessions are memorable, the questions always fun, and the interviews super deep and comprehensive.
• The ChatC Group’s Interview with an Expert: Technically not a podcast, but this is an emerging series of interviews done in a podcast-style conversation. My personal favorite is the session with Hillary Black.

Put it into ✨practice✨

It’s not enough to hear about designing conversations, you have to go out there and do it yourself too!

Designathons

Design competitions may be easier to come by if the competition revolves around visual or UX design. Conversation design competitions? They’re still pretty rare, but thankfully more of them are cropping up every year.

• Digital Assistant Academy’s Hackabot: As a participant of the 2021 hackathon, this was invaluable to my education. It’s one thing to work on a team to design a bot, it’s another to present your work to a panel of judges and hear real-time critique to improve your project. There’ll be another one in 2022, so keep your eyes peeled!
• Voice Devs’ Designathon: This event was special to 2020 with the pandemic allowing events to reach beyond their usual audience. Not sure if the future holds any more #VoiceFirst Designathons, but at least the project requirements are online. This would be a fun weekend project if you’d rather not come up with a prompt on your own.
• Witlingo’s The One Pizza Project: Free and open to anyone aspiring to enter the field, so long as you work in teams of three. This is great to get hands-on experience of #VoiceFirst work you could add to a portfolio!
• Botmock V2 Template Design Challenge: The most recent (September 2021) example of a chatbot design competition complete with challenge prizes.

Newsletters

The new learn-as-you-go approach. These newsletters send you a curated list of challenges to tackle on your own, but the work doesn’t have to be solo. If you’re comfortable sharing your work online, you may receive feedback by professionals in the field on how to improve your solution or address concerns in a real-world use case. They’re also a great portfolio piece, as demonstrated by UX writer and conversation designer Joel Ramey.

• VUIchallenge
• Daily Conversation Design Challenge

*Hacks* to save your wallet 💸

My low-cost CxD tuition of $25.97 (full disclosure: it was two ebooks, one of which I bought with a coupon code) was achieved through both luck and being really adamant about staying budget-friendly. At the time I first realized conversation design was a real field and “Conversation Designer” was an actual designation, I was working as a vendor at Google (a vendor is one of three of Google’s contingent workforce). Unlike my previous contract roles in tech, being a vendor gave me the added bonus of employer-paid learning resources. Thanks to the LinkedIn Learning and Udemy licenses covered by my employer, I was able to take my first two conversation design courses for free.

If there’s one thing I heavily avoided at the start of my education, it was books. I have nothing against books, but they are expensive and they should be! The thing about getting into Conversation Design though is that everyone in the community will refer you to Designing Voice User Interfaces like it’s the holy grail (it is, there is no escaping that). My workaround was simple: as a resident of Sunnyvale, CA and a library card holder, I have free access to O’Reilly media, which includes — yes, Cathy Pearl’s book. It’s not always ideal to have an ebook version of literature you reference nearly all the time, but when you’re broke you make it work.

Fast-forward a few months into my journey, I enrolled in the first ever cohort for Voice Tech Global’s Advanced Conversational Experience Design course. I lucked out completely as the only student from the course who won a free seat thanks to a raffle I had entered randomly one fateful night on slack. But it’s not just about luck. Anyone who has gone through a UX bootcamp will tell you what matters about the resources you’re given is how you use them.

For me, regardless of where I had learned a new technique or a new part of the design process, I’d always tried to apply it. If I heard on a webinar how error messages could go beyond the usual, “Sorry, I didn’t understand that,” then I’d pull up my own side projects immediately after and script some new prompts based on what I learned.

You’re not required to have coursework under your belt or an online certification on your resume to make it in this field — after all, all of the industry leaders we know of now were self-taught. The only thing is, it’s hard to do it on your own. Being responsible for your own growth with no external accountability can sometimes feel impossible. That’s why I’m thankful to initiatives like Voice Tech Global’s scholarship or Botmock offering volunteers a free ticket to the Conversation Design summit (which again, I did for #free) because learning shouldn’t be inaccessible.

As a conversation designer who’s “made it” through to the other side, sharing knowledge has become the central tenet of my work philosophy. A lot of my current success is attributed to the people who first believed in me and shared their own learnings with me.

Community is everything, and if you’re serious about getting started in conversation design, this is your most valuable resource.

It may be simple advice, but if you don’t know something, ask! Like me, a lot of designers are open to coffee chats and are happy to welcome anyone into the field. Two great places to start finding those connections are Hillary Black’s Conversation Designers Internet Club and everyone on the CxD Twitter list.

A few words of advice:

• Public libraries are your friend (free books!)
• Sign up for projects or apply concepts before you’re “ready”
• Create connections with people in the community

One last thing

Money isn’t the only thing that matters here. Your time and energy are precious as well. Be picky about the things you devote your attention to. Remember: you don’t have to do everything; you don’t have to go to all of the events or read all the articles all of the time. Be kind to yourself as you learn. No one will doubt your enthusiasm if you can’t make that one meet-up or watch that one industry interview. The best designers don’t know everything, but they use everything they do know to make it work regardless.