Elizabeth Rodwell, Author at The Anthropology Career Readiness Network

About Elizabeth Rodwell (Edit profile)

Elizabeth Rodwell is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Houston and an anthropologist of science and technology. Liz is the founding director of the University of Houston UX Lab and was director of the Houston chapter of the User Experience Professionals Association from 2019-2025. Liz’s current research is about conversational artificial intelligence and user experience. Her first book, Push the Button: Interactive Television and Collaborative Journalism in Japan (2024), is available wherever books are sold.

How can linguistic anthropology help you work with AI?

I started working on voice assistants as a usability challenge in 2019 after one of the students in my User Experience (UX) Principles class asked, “I naturally speak in Spanish and English within the same sentence. Why can’t Google Assistant handle that?” This compelling question motivated me to explore the intersection of conversation design and user experience. I have been studying conversational UX ever since. Conversational UX/conversation design entails writing, revising, and testing the dialog used by conversational agents that talk to humans. These agents range from those with a VUI (Alexa, Google, Siri) to chatbots (Woebot), embodied conversational agents (Replika), [...]