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About Lingofest
Lingofest, organized by Witlingo and sponsored by Weber State University (Ogden Utah) is part event, part community, part teaching platform, and part a few other things. Check it out and join in the fun!
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We don't believe in monetizing educational content. But we believe that people are fundamentally good and fair. If you wish to watch the presentations, please take a moment and consider donating. Your donation helps us defray the cost of the conference as well as support the student essay contest. And as you make your choice, think of those who are less fortunate than you. Please go here to support Lingofest.
Student Essay Contest
Since its launch in 2017, Lingofest has always sought to involve students who are in the Arts, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences and to get them to think about the emergence of the conversational robot, the implications of such an emergence to what it means to be a human, and what role they may want to play in the rise of conversational voice first and audio. This field will need not only designers, developers, marketers and salespeople, but also researchers, ethicists, linguists, epistemologists, performing artists, sociologists, to just list a few of the possibilities.
See the FAQ below for more details.
Presentations
All Presentations will begin airing on the Lingofest Youtube channel as live broadcasts starting at12:00 noon EST of their designated day and will continue airing for 24 hours. During the first hour, the presenter will be available via Youtube chat to answer any questions the audience may wish to ask via the chat forum. All links will go live by presentation days.
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FAQ
What is Lingofest?
Organized by Witlingo and sponsored by Weber State University, Lingofest is is part event, part community, part teaching platform, and part a few other things. Its core focus is Voice First: the emerging Conversational Voice First interface delivered on patforms such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Samsung Bixby, as well as audio content delivered in other media and channels, including podcasts, embedded audio in digital properties, live social audio, and crowd sourced voice first content channels.
What is the theme of this virtual gathering?
In this event, Lingofest will focus on the following basic question: How do we, members of the Voice First community, the builders and the innovators, move the space from the hype cycle -- the natural phase of any truly innovative emerging technology -- to the value phase?
Who should attend Lingofest?
Anyone within the marketing team of a company that is thinking about adding voice to their marketing and branding mix should attend. Members of customer care teams should also attend, since voice automation has a well-proven record of delivering value through self service voice automation. Others who should attend include anyone who is interested in learning about Voice First, whether they are currently working on delivering products and solutions or aspire to do so: product marketers, product managers, UX field researchers, UX designers, software developers, quality assurance engineers, beta launch program managers, marketers, sales people, as well as investors.
When does it start and when does it end?
The event starts on March 1st, 2021, and ends on March 31st, 2021.
How much does it cost?
How much you pay depends on how much you can afford and how much you want to pay. We have the following options:
- I really can't afford to pay anything right now. But I promise that next time, if I can afford it, I will pitch in.
- I am on a tight budget, but I can afford to pay $20.
- I'm getting there, so I can pay half price: $100.
- I am doing relatively OK, so I can afford to pay full price: $200.
- I have been blessed and I love Lingofest very much, so I will pay $1,000.
I want to sponsor Lingofest. What do I do?
Thank you for considering a sponsorship of Lingofest. Please go here to find out more. You can also email us at lingofest@witlingo.com
How do I access the talks?
Videos to the talks as well as PDFs of those talks will be made available at 12:00 noon EST of the day of the talks.
Why this format?
We will be airing one new presentation at 12:00 noon EST, every weekday, starting from March 1, 2021 and ending on March 31, 2021. The presentations will be run as live broadcasts on Youtube Live, where the presenter will be available to answer questions on the chat forum (text only) during the first hour (from 12:00 noon to 1:00 pm). At 1:00 pm EST, the presentation will then be run again, re-cycling over until the next day at 12:00 noon when the next presentation is published. At which point, the old presentation will be made available to view as a regular Youtube video.
The goal of trying this format is to see if we can give the community and the attendees the time and the space via the social media landscape to engage the presenters and each other in conversations about the topics presented. Conversations can be had on Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Youtube, Clubhouse, and anywhere else the audience wishes to take the conversation to. All you need to do is hashtag your conversations using #LingoFest to make it easy for others to locate the conversations. (Make sure you capitalize the L and F for screen readers that are used by blind users.)
Will the presentations be available after the conference?
Yes. All videos and their accompanying PDFs will be made available and accessible for anyone, and for free.
Tell me more about the Student Essay Contest.
Students, whether high schoolers, college undergraduates or graduates, are invited to submit essays of no more than 1,000 words long on one of the three topics below.
3 essays will be picked as the winners, and each winner will receive $USD 100 (one hundred US dollars).
All submitted essays will be published on the Lingofest.com website.
Instructions
- Submit your essays to lingofest@witlingo.com
- Deadline: EOD (US EST) March 31st, 2021.
- Your essay should be between 750 words and 1,000 words in length.
- Start the subject of your email with: "Essay"
- Attach to your email a PDF of your essay. The essay should have a title, and the title should indicate which of the three topics you selected. For instance: "(Topic #1) 'Talking to my Fridge: Nietzschean Ramblings'"
- Write for clarity. Anyone should understand what you are trying to say. Avoid jargon or technical terms unless they are essential to what you have to say. If you use such terms, explain them in your narrative.
- Feel free to challenge any premises you think are being smuggled in the way the topic questions are formulated.
The 3 topics
Please pick exactly one topic and indicate in the title of your essay which one you picked:
- Imagine a world where you could talk to any appliance in your house. In what way would we change as human beings in such a world compared to who we are and how we see ourselves now? We are looking for your thoughts on the implications of living in such a world and not necessarily on whether you think that such a development is a good thing or a bad thing (although you are welcome to express your opinion as you develop your thoughts).
- If you were to subscribe to one school of conversational voice design, which of these two would you pick: (1) The one that calls for designing conversational robots that emulate as closely as possible the behavior of human beings in human-to-human conversations, or (2) The one that calls for designing conversational robots that are eminently robotic, with the focus being first and foremost on getting these robots to do their job as efficiently as possible?
- Children born after 2014, when the Amazon Echo smart speaker came to market, will not know a world where they were not able to talk to a robot, such as, "Alexa, what's the capital of Nebraska," or "Hey Google, shut up!" What are your thoughts on the proposition that children who grow up with such talking robots will grow up to be impolite, barking imperatives and interrupting people, and being all around bad human beings?
Lingofest 2021
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