Alexis DoreauCerence / VOICE AI · AUTOMOTIVE
Designing beyond
the screen.
Exploring how voice, context and connected interfaces fit into the driving experience.
Experience design · Conversational flows · Advanced prototyping
Voice AI, multimodal interaction & connected vehicles
The context
In Montréal, I worked with Cerence on voice and automotive experiences. The design horizon was different: an interaction imagined today might reach a vehicle several years later.
The question
A spoken interaction cannot be designed screen by screen. It needs to account for intent, context, recognition errors and interruptions, while respecting the attention available to a driver.
Design decisions
01 — Start with what the person means.
With the team, I worked on conversational flows and scenarios: how the system listens, confirms an action, asks for clarification and recovers when a request cannot be completed.
02 — Connect the different modes of interaction.
The work linked phone, vehicle and environment, exploring continuity between voice and visual feedback. Each channel had to support the task and context.
03 — Prototype the question we need to answer.
Advanced prototypes helped the team explore experiences before the final hardware and technology were settled, including work presented at CES. The purpose was to test the behaviour, not just the appearance.
Explore the screens
Inside the vehicle
How I would assess the value
Retrospective measurement ideas, not reported results.
- Value to keep in focus
- People who complete their intended action with minimal interaction effort.
- Signals to investigate
- Task completion in contextual tests; clarification turns; successful recovery after recognition errors; continuity between voice and visual feedback.
- Trade-offs to watch
- Attention demands, unwanted actions and ambiguous confirmations. These are interaction measures to test in context, not a claim of validated driving safety.
What I took from it
Working with AI starts well before generation. It begins with understanding intent, acknowledging uncertainty and helping people stay in control.