CogX Festival: Conversations about Conversational AI

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Speaking Naturally

4 min readJun 18, 2019

CogX 2019 was an epic adventure getting to meet so many leaders in the conversational AI community.

To you all, a huge thank you from me and the rest of the CognitionX team for your contributions!

With over 500 speakers across 200+ sessions and 10 stages and more than 17,000 registered attendees, it was networking heaven: particularly because the festival spread over 63 acres (25 ha) there were cafes and bars galore to meet up and chat in, rain or shine.

For those who couldn’t make it, never fear! Everything was recorded and over the next few weeks we’ll be sharing the recordings for free! Below we have three we’ve selected to enjoy; more to come in coming weeks. Highlights from each day also included at the bottom.

Also this week:

Microsoft leaps ahead in natural language understanding
Voice banking for those in danger of losing it
12 applications of NLP in healthcare

📺 CogX 2019, Festival of All Things AI and Emerging Tech: Catch up on our YouTube channel (and subscribe).

Success in Conversational AI
Everything suggests that voice computing is here to stay. I introduce four voice computing case studies: CEO Tom Hewitson from Labworks.io (Webby award winner for best educational Alexa skill), CEO Jess Williams from Opearlo (Top Alexa skillmaker), CEO John Taylor from Action.ai on retail banking and finally Dr Catherine Breslin (Ex-Amazon Alexa speech scientist) now at Cobalt Speech.

Innovation in Customer Care with Conversational AI
How conversational AI is transforming customer care including designing great conversational AI experiences with Hans van Dam CEO of Robocopy, Prins Jaspal, CRO & Cofounder of Contexta360, CEO Richie Barter from Altviz, and Naomi Fitzpatrick from Intercom.

Can AI be creative?
World first: a keynote from OpenAI’s Christine Payne on her new AI music generation project, MuseNet that Andrew Ng called recently “one of the coolest neural network projects in recent memory”. Includes examples of cutting edge natural language generation: poetry and fake (but on-message) Theresa May quotes!

Under the hood

Microsoft leaps ahead in language understanding
Microsoft’s latest update (with source code) puts them at the top of a benchmark that needs to win at 12 difficult natural language tests.

One of them is notoriously difficult and yet elegantly simple: attribute the “it” correctly in statements such as the one below. Without world knowledge, computers are severely hamstrung.

“the trophy did not fit in the suitcase because it was too big”.

“A couple months ago, the best any system could do on these types of problems is a little more than 70% accurate. Microsoft Research has now achieved 89% accuracy! That is a quantum leap in performance on this type of “common sense reasoning” challenge.”

Old Problems, New Solutions

Helping the vocally-impaired speak their voice
“Voice banking is a process where the person who risks losing his voice records a series of phrases, which are then used to create a digitized voice.”
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