2019 Predictions for Voice Industry & Chatbots
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What will 2019 bring in the world of AI for speech and text? Who better to ask than industry practitioners. Voicebot asked 35 voice leaders, and we grouped and summarised the results under three headings: maturation, increased adoption and smarter conversations. An exciting year for chatbots, speech analytics and virtual assistants alike.
Where is the big opportunity with chatbots? Addressing chronic skill shortage with rich conversational business capability. This week we have two examples of this.
What progress is getting us excited? Smarter conversations. This includes more lifelike speech, better understanding, and better ability to remember relevant parts of past conversations. Depending on use case we are expecting to see astonishing progress in all three areas. For example, we recorded a full 25 minute voice conversation this week with the socialbot Replika.ai (‘talk about anything”). The conversation has a long way to go but it was vastly more coherent and sensible than most others we’ve evaluated.
- 📈Predictions from 35 Voice Industry Leaders
- 🗣Socialbot Replika.ai launches voice edition.
- ♥️Sentiment is relative: great case study on how elusive sentiment can be
- ✍️Scaling quality content: Forbes joins Quartz and others with focus on intelligent content authoring tools
- Chinese chatbot & emotion detection company gets $US30M Series B funding
Learn from the Pros
2019: Predictions from 35 Voice Industry Leaders
Voicebot asked a selection of voice industry leaders their predictions on consumer adoption, user experience, technology advances, and the next big thing. We summarise and group them into 3 categories: business maturation, smarter conversations, and increased adoption. Read more
Testing the Lucia Chatbot with Asylum Seekers
This is a great example of how important it is to a) understand your audience when designing a chatbot and b) appreciate the value of chatbots when you have a chronic skills shortage.
This is a study that tries to address the problem of helping those with the asylum process into the US. The designers picked up a bunch of incredibly valuable insights around what’s the most important for them and what platforms matter to them. Read more
Here’s a snippet from the chatbot: “AVOID saying that you are going to the USA for work or because the pay is better”.
Sentiment: the Elusive Frontier
Sentiment analysis — whether something is positive or negative — is a capability that’s been around for some time. We found a great example from a Barclay’s report that shows how elusive it can be to get right though. For example, is the report below positive or negative? Read more
Leading the Pack
Socialbot Replika.ai launches voice version
Loneliness is a growth industry, and socialbots are chatbots that are designed first and foremost for trust, intimacy and companionship.
Replika.ai launched a voice version recently. Read moreon our experience.
Scaling content creation with AI
How do you provide quality content consistently and at scale? Forbes is joining Quartz and other publishers to invest in next-gen tools for rapid, accurate and consistent delivery of content. Forbes is actually claiming to have tools that create full drafts. Stay tuned.
CognitionX Research
Is a chatbot right for your business?
Where should you start?
What tools should you use?
These are not easy questions to answer, so CognitionX published “The Business of Natural Language Computing: a primer on chatbots and voicebots”.
£395+VAT for one license, £1995+VAT for 10
Numbers that Matter
Emotibot chatbot and emotion detection: $US30m Series B
More confidence in chatbot capability with this Chinese company founded by an ex-Microsoft employee securing a healthy Series B. While we’re confident there are many others in this space in China, the English press release is somewhat rare (all the demos on the site are in Chinese).
