I’m the founder of Webby-award-winning Conversation Design studio labworks.io

I have created conversational experiences for some of the world's most iconic brands. 

I’ve advised start-ups, FTSE 100 companies and government on how to build for voice. I’m an Alexa Champion, a Bixby Premier Developer and one of Voicebot.ai’s top 10 Product Professionals in the voice industry.

Ok, so if you’ve got this far I’m assuming you’d like to know a little more about me!

I started my career as a journalist at the Daily Telegraph before moving into the digital operations team.

After a year-long break to travel the world, I joined Lonely Planet.

I worked as part of the 'experiments' team to come up with a new revenue model and then managed the editorial team that implemented it.

After the sale of Lonely Planet to NC2 Media, I left to found my own travel-related start-up. 

Despite testing well, we failed to raise the investment needed to make it a reality.

Instead, I joined the Money Advice Service (a not-for-profit promoting financial behaviour change). 

I redesigned the retirement user journey and collaborated with academics to include 'nudges' that promoted behaviour change.

A talk I did about this work and the new content strategy approach I was using went viral within the industry and a few weeks later Facebook asked if I'd join as a content strategist.

I worked on several projects including 'Stories' and ‘Facebook for Work’ plus pitched and designed an internal-hackathon-winning app.

I was also lucky enough to get early access to Facebook M.

I instantly saw the potential of bots and voice assistants and that companies would need people to design them.

Being a product designer who started out as a writer, I knew I had the skills they'd need so I decided to found labworks.io to as a conversation design consultancy.

In the following 12 months I designed bots for everyone from small startups to billion dollar companies and even the UK government, becoming one of the best known ‘Conversation Designers’ in the world.

And then Alexa arrived in the UK. 

I knew that my clients would want me to design for it and that I needed to get some experience with it.

So I built a game. A simple version of the childhood favourite: Would you rather?

About 6 weeks later my phone rang and on the other end of the line was someone from Amazon. Apparently this silly little game had become the third most popular thing on the platform and that they were going to start paying me money to maintain it.

I crunched the numbers and realised I was onto something.

So, I decided to stop doing consultancy and focus on building voice games. As each game launched I reinvested the additional income into growing the team and before long we were the leading voice developer in Europe.

Along the way we started raised a funding round from one of London’s leading VCs and won a Webby-award for one of our games.

Today labworks makes Voice Arcade, the #1 voice game subscription service in the world, and I’m one of voicebot.ai’s leaders in voice (the only time I’ll ever be on a list with Jeff Bezos) and an Alexa Champion.

But that wasn’t the end of it. You see, this thing called ChatGPT came along and it turned out that all the time I spent tinkering with Large Language Models over the last few years suddenly became really useful.

So now, as well as making Voice Arcade, labworks is back doing consultancy for people looking to build LLM-based digital assistants. And so far it’s been a wild ride - this is clearly the future and it’s really exciting to be a part of it!

But, if you’ve got this far you should probably just drop me an email and we I can tell you the rest over coffee.

Conversational AI London Meetup

I also run London's largest monthly chatbot and voice assistant meetup called Conversational AI London. Previous sessions have involved talks from Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon plus some of the coolest startups around.

If you're in London and interested in bots why not come along to the next one?