#2 Beirut AI community update
As Amir Shevat - the head of developer relations in Slack — said, bots are the future of software. They are going to disrupt the software industry in the same way the web and mobile revolutions did. But what are these bots? And why do we need them?
Two weeks ago we had our second quarterly event for the Beirut AI community where we’ve introduced the concept of chatbots and discussed their benefits for businesses in different industries. More on that below!
Exciting news!! Before we dig into the talks and the lessons learned of this event, we would like to share some big news!
We are really excited to be partnering up with NAR (www.nar.ai) a Lebanese startup that’s working on state-of-the-art technology in Computer Vision and Machine Learning. We are both driven by the same vision of turning #Beirut into the #AI hub of the region!
Shared Lessons Learned @ Beirut AI #2
Our second quarterly meetup was hosted at Touch Lab — Beirut (thanks for hosting us!) on April 14th, 2018. Like we mentioned above, our event was themed around Chatbots 🤖!
Both our speakers had a wealth of knowledge on this subject that they were eager to share with the community. Here’s a quick summary of both talks, for a more detailed presentation please check out the event recording here.
Did you know that 90% of the world’s data was created in the last 2 years?! How will you find what you want? Being constantly bombarded with advertisements, it becomes more difficult to get simple answers easily & quickly.
That’s how Maher Hassanieah, the CEO of Fig, started by defining the problem and offering some related statistics.
70% of users demand an INSTANT ANSWER
Then, Maher defined what chatbots are, what they aren’t and how do we benefit from having a chatbot. Also, he discussed the different use cases of chatbots in different industries, like retail, insurance, banking & finance, etc…
CONSUMERS NO LONGER WANT TO REACH A BUSINESS VIA PHONE OR EMAIL
After Maher’s talk and a small Q&A session, we continued our event with our next speaker, Marc Asmar.
Marc is a software engineer with more than 2 years of bot development experience, and he’s also the co-founder of PIKI. He started his talk with an overview of Microsoft Bot Framework and its main components. Since Marc is a developer, he gave us the technical aspect of chatbots by explaining which NLP tools can be used and what is an NLU engine and how we can utilize it to build smart chatbots.
A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human — Alan Turing
Once the technology behind chatbots was explained, Marc proceeded to showcase a demo of his bot’s capabilities. Most importantly, he shared his experience with bots, discussed a few best practices and tips through examples/demos and finally mentioned some of the important KPIs you will need to measure to have a successful bot.
If you’re interested in watching the event’s recording, please check out this YouTube video.
The event was VERY informative and offered a lot of insights for all of the people who attended, and this was obvious in the networking session that followed. Some very interesting questions were asked and everyone participated in the discussion.
We hope everyone enjoyed the event as much as we did organizing it! Our upcoming event will be a technical session that covers some Data Science applications, it will be held on May 26th, also at Touch Lab-Beirut.
Thanks to those that joined us and we hope to see you engaging in future too!
