Tracy Gravelle

My path into this field started almost by accident. As a Linguistics grad student writing my Master's thesis on syntactic theory, I took a part-time job building speech recognition grammars for telecommunication IVRs. That work drew me into the human factors side of technology — the study of how people and machines actually interact — and I never looked back. After that, I worked as an IVR design consultant for many years — auditing, designing, and building voice applications across different industries. I also helped shape the Alexa experience at Amazon for a few years, and today I'm at Salesforce, designing engaging conversational experiences for Agentforce Voice.

As part of the Agent Behavior Design team at Salesforce, I guide others on voice and chat interactions, helping teams navigate the nuances of designing conversational flows and shaping agent behavior guidelines. Earlier in my career, I contributed to two patents related to voice recognition menu navigation with error prevention and recovery — early work in a field I've watched continually grow and evolve ever since.

When I'm not designing conversations, I'm usually curled up with a good book, working through a jigsaw puzzle, or starting yet another stealth archer build in Skyrim. I balance out the screen time with yoga and hiking — a little movement and fresh air go a long way after a day of thinking about how people talk to machines.