A recent issue of the journal features eight specially commissioned articles describing the state of play in CA research on medical attraction. The contributors covered the ground from accident and emergency to palliative care, and everything in between. But doing a really solid job on identifying the state of the art is no easy matter, and I’m delighted that one of the contributors, Catherine Woods has given us an account of the work involved.

In 2022 Becky Barnes and I were meeting on Teams once a month to discuss ongoing papers from the most recent project we worked on together. We often met on a Friday afternoon to discuss goals and writing, but only if we both managed to clear our main work and meetings for the week. Funnily enough, when there is a promise of talking about all things CA with a colleague you enjoy working with and just before the weekend, you always work efficiently during that week.

There’s an increasing demand for Conversation Analysis texts as the discipline becomes established, and new markets emerge among students and researchers. One of the most intriguing texts to come out soon is Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis in Motion: Emerging Methods and New Technologies, edited by a group based at Oulu University. I’m delighted that the group have written a piece for the blog.

There’s a lot going on at the interface of AI and speech – both recognition and production – and some of it draws on ideas from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. But is it any good? Stuart Reeves runs the rule over some of the issues.

Artificial Intelligence is a big deal now. We’re told that AI systems are reaching and even exceeding human performance at things like playing games, hearing and transcribing words (Xiong et al., 2017), translating between languages, or recognising faces and emotions (Lu and Tang, 2014). This means we are entering a world where it’s possible for people to have conversations with AI agents (a Google researcher recently claimed a chatbot as “sentient”), or get computers to understand what’s in a picture and even generate their own art when prompted.