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H2H vs. M2H Conversational Modeling: Part 1— Some Rules and Guidelines

Ahmed Bouzid
4 min readJan 4, 2021

This post is Part 1 of a multi-part series of posts on the topic: When designing a voice first conversational experience, should the designer strive to emulate the human-to-human (H2H) model or should they adopt a different model, a machine to human one (M2H), in their quest to deliver a highly usable user interface.

In this post, I attempt to identify and articulate some rules and guidelines for designing a highly usable voice user experience based on the M2H design philosophy.

Part 2 of the series illustrates an attempt at applying the rules and guidelines below in a voice first conversational design example.

Part 3 provides a running dialog from the many contributors who have pitched in with their thoughts, suggestions, criticism, and observations.

All of the above articles mentioned, and this article here, are a work in progress. So feel free to provide your feedback either directly in this document or by emailing me at ahmed.bouzid@gmail.com.

In a recent Linkedin thread, I kicked off a conversation with the following salvo:

Having arrived at the near conclusion that, at least with present day technology and our current knowledge and understanding of the physics of conversation interactions, it is almost impossible to deliver on a voice assistant that can be as conversationally sophisticated as a human being, I am becoming more and more convinced that in order to deliver highly performing voice UX (voice UX that successfully completes tasks and does so without frustrating the user), new rules of engagement need to be established. We need the voice equivalent of the bank’s ATM. ATMs don’t try to emulate human agents, but they are great at what they do and do it better and faster than a human being. One ATM is more or less the same as the next ATM, so that one doesn’t need to learn much to be able to use any ATM that they come acros…

What ensued was a rich conversation that has alerted me to new thoughts, raised points I hadn’t thought of, and opened up new question fronts.

In this post, I list my first steps away from the Anthropomorphic model (using human to human conversation as a model and working to have the voice…

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Ahmed Bouzid
Ahmed Bouzid

Written by Ahmed Bouzid

Founder & CEO at Witlingo and co-author of “The Elements of Voice First Style” (O’Reilly Media, 2022)

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