Ubiquitous voice interfaces like the Google Home and Amazon Alexa became available only recently. The history of humanity's attempts to converse with machines goes back centuries, however. We will review this history of the effort to give machines voice. This analysis will provide context to the core concepts of modern conversational design, like Natural Language Processing and Voice User Experience. We will introduce design and development concepts for building voice interfaces that work. To show how simple it is to get started, we will conduct a live demonstration of developing a voice interface.