Another year, another trend forecast for Conversational AI! Predicting the next year’s buzz

2020 has been a real “annus horribilis” for the entire global economy and for each one of us. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every aspect of our lives, crashing businesses, and having a significant impact on Conversational AI.

AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants were at the forefront of the fight against Covid, helped screen and triage patients, conducted surveys, provided vital Covid-related information, and more. And quite naturally, we saw more conversational agents in telemedicine — from FAQ-chatbots and virtual consultants to chatbot-therapists — that made health services more accessible to people who can’t leave their homes (and there were billions of them in the spring of 2020). …

Just AI’s MAKE CONVERSATIONAL AI WORK challenge held as part of the Junction Hackathon in 2020. Originally published at Just AI blog

On 6–8 November, over 2000 hackers gathered to work on 11 different challenges during the huge annual hackathon in Europe — Junction 2020 Connected. Participants from 299 cities of 54 countries teamed up to build working solutions and fight for the main prize of the Junction hackathon — €10,000.

This time hackathon organizers reckoned with the Coronavirus safety precautions, for this reason besides the traditional offline hubs all over the world, hackers could participate online. …

How to teach an assistant everything the app can do? This is the second part of the tutorial. Originally published at Just AI blog

Last time we took the open-source habit tracking app Habitica and demonstrated how to add a voice assistant and create a basic scenario — the weather forecast — out-of-the-box.

Now let’s move on to the next level. We will learn how to invoke certain screens, create complex queries with NLU, and complete a form with voice.

Implementing a basic voice scenario into a habit tracking app — learning from a Habitica use case. Originally published at Just AI blog

Don’t you think that a great many mobile apps would be a lot more convenient if they had voice control? And I don’t mean chatting with a banking bot. In most cases, voice navigation or a conversational form-filling is just enough.

Through the use of the Habitica example (an open-source Kotlin-based habit tracking app) Vit Gorbachyov, Just AI solution architect, will show you how to add a voice interface into any app swiftly and seamlessly.

How convenient that sounds? …

And which one to choose for your big voice-first project. Originally published at Just AI blog.

Why do developers hate frameworks? Busting a myth

Some guy once said that real developers do not use frameworks, real developers build them. Though that line may sound pretty cool and motivating, the reality is that frameworks are irreplaceable and indispensable. They provide users with a clear process for turning their idea into code, with no need to know all the ins and the outs.

An all too common myth is that frameworks reduce the possibilities of what can be done and leave no room for control. In fact, frameworks were never a one-size-fits-all solution and can be customized and enriched to fit the specific parameters of each use case. Most frameworks were built on common principles, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel — it’s a great deal simpler to start with a framework that already built, make sure it really matches your requirements and goals, and fully customize it for your needs instead of starting from scratch. …