BotCon gets Cape Town Chatting Bots
Last week, BotCon — South Africa’s first conversational interface conference — made its Mother City debut, guiding guests on an exploration of the subjects of chatbots, AI, machine learning and natural language processing.
The day boasted an impressive speaker line up of key industry players from the likes of:
· RetroRabbit · Facebook· Praekelt · BotPress · SKA· Clevva · Feersum Engine
· Native VML · Yonder Media · Data Prophet · WhereIsMyTransport · IBM
· First Technology · Simply Financial Services
Speakers served up a healthy helping of invaluable knowledge and insight, sparking debate around the role of these technologies in the future and further whetting appetites for what lies ahead in the realm of chatbots.
Amongst the highlights of the day was an entertaining re-enactment of the conversation between HAL 9000 and Dave from 2001: A Space Odyssey using ‘modern chatbot technologies’, presented by Martin Raison of Facebook AI Research. This was of course in addition to the wealth of information included in his opening keynote, ‘Teaching machines to interact with people’.
Stuart Steedman, Software Architect at Yonder Media, paid tribute to the event theme with a montage of pop culture examples used to discuss people’s history with automatons and bringing back memories of Marty McFly’s epic hover board chase in Back to the Future.
Tofeeq Ockards of SKA SA gave the inside scoop on his first chatbot experiment, revealing that it was to live-tweet the subtitle track of an episode of Buffy. He reportedly slayed it.
Engagement was the key objective for the day. In addition to questions raised during talks, the Facebook Messenger Round Table, led by Angelique Kamara and Proud Dzambukira of Facebook Strategic Partnerships, provided an excellent platform for candid, off-record questions.
Attendees were also encouraged to engage with the BotCon 2017 Messenger chatbot throughout the day for event and line-up information, adding a helpful experiential element that proved to be a hit. In the words of Gustav Praekelt, Founder of Praekelt.com & Praekelt.org, “It wouldn’t be a bot conference without a bot”.
We’d like to extend a huge thank you to all involved in making BotCon 2017 a great success and look forward to welcoming you to the next one.
In the meantime, we’ve put together some standout snippets from speakers below.
“Value of bot implementation is not in the framework, it is in the execution.” — RetroRabbit
“No-one is going to solve #AI, alone, in a garage. The only way is to collaborate.”
– Martin Raison, Facebook.
“We should just try not to mimic humans. We should try to use these technologies, at least at this early stage, to do things that will help our consumers and ultimately provide some utility.”
– Justin Watson, co-founder of Botpress.
“The chatbot value proposition should not be the same as your call centre or your website.”
– Belinda Lewis, Feersum Engine.
‘A bot doesn’t live in isolation; it’s a part of your brands identity” — RetroRabbit
“There are 70 million business pages on FB, 20 million accepting messages, representing big opportunity for bots.”
– Angelique Kamara, Facebook Strategic Partnerships
“We need to move toward a consumer-led future for bots and automation: build for what the user is trying to do.”
– Tiaan de Kock, Native VML
“As humans we have a desire to anthropomorphize everything around us, especially our technology”
– Stuart Steedman, Yonder Media.
“4 C’s to Success: Collaboration, Communication, Critical Thinking, Creativity. Bonus: Ability to Code.”
– Johan de Villiers, First Technology.
