Learn About Some of the Top Conversational AI Leaders Who Came to CogX
As part of the larger CogX London 2019 Festival of AI and emerging tech, we had over 38 confirmed senior leader NLP practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds talking about the wide-ranging impact of AI on speech and text.
Look at this small sample of some of the speakers:
Check out selected bios of the leaders from above:
- Aakrit Vaish, CEO & Co-founder from Haptik (Indian conversational AI)
- Akemi Tsunagawa, CEO & Founder from Bespoke (Asian travel & hospitality)
- Catherine Breslin, Solutions Architect from CobaltSpeech (Ex-Amazon speech researcher)
- Laura Harrison, Snr Product Manager, BBC Research & Development from BBC (Innovative digital storytelling)
- William Tunstall-Pedoe, Founder (Creator of Alexa)
See the full CogX 2019 programme | See the 500+ speakers at CogX
In the news:
The best technology experiences fit us like a glove: AI for speech and text makes it easier for us to express what we want and what we mean, but our eyes are still pretty handy for understanding.
So, just as we have screens on computers, expect also to see voice experiences to be routinely enriched by screens as well, and furthermore, for cameras to give AI eyes.
In industry jargon, this is called “multimodal” interfaces: this week we see a fun new Alexa skill with a screen experience, camera-driven learning from Microsoft, and acquisition of a product a couple of weeks ago in a similar space (“omnichannel”) that makes it easy for services to always be where customers are.
Toys To Try
Make music on your Alexa
Here we’ve got a great feature on the winner for the Alexa Skill Challenge: Multimodal, which combines voice, visuals, and touch to make fun music!
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Microsoft’s camera-first UX to help learn new words
Eight Microsoft interns have developed a new language learning tool that uses the smartphone camera to help adults improve their English literacy by learning the words for the things around them. Cf Google Lens
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Smarter Conversations
Google’s Duplex uses AI to mimic humans (sometimes)
In a free service, bots call restaurants and make reservations. The technology is impressive, except for when the caller is actually a person.
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Numbers That Matter
VoiceSell closes $4M funding round to bring voice commerce to websites
Very interesting approach from this startup who is looking to build voice solutions for online retail.
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Zendesk acquires Smooch, doubles down on support via messaging apps like WhatsApp
Customer support specialist Zendesk has made an acquisition so that it can make a bigger move into how it works within social media platforms, and specifically messaging apps.
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Leading The Pack
UNESCO highlights danger of female virtual assistants
The UN has put out a helpful report which provides guidelines for less gender biased conversational agents and highlights five problems with our female default for virtual assistant.
See also from past news:
