AVIOS
Conversational Interaction
Conference
CONNECTING WITH COMPUTERS - SPEECH, TEXT OR BOTH?
PROGRAM FROM THE 2022 CONFERENCE
TUESDAY, APRIL 12TH
9:00-9:55 | Keynote Panel: What’s the Status of Conversational Technology Today and Where are We Heading?
An insightful discussion of the state of conversational technology, highlighting priorities for companies today and planning for the near future.
Moderator: William Meisel, Executive Director, AVIOS, and President, TMA Associates
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Phil Cohen, Chief Scientist, Openstream.ai
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David Nahamoo, Chief Technology Officer, Pryon
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Natalie Rutgers, Head of Product, Deepgram
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Tom Spencer, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Achronix Semiconductor
10:00-11:00 | Case Studies 1
Speakers discuss what they learned from deployments and gained using conversational technology.
Moderator: Marie Meteer, Senior Research Scientist, Pryon & President, AVIOS
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Chatbot with a Brain: A Case Study, Peter Voss, CEO/ Chief Scientist, Aigo.ai
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Giving a Brain and a Voice to Life Sized Digital Characters, David Colleen, CEO, SapientX
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When Chatbots Fail: Collaborative Intelligence To The Rescue, Cosimo Spera, CEO, Co-Founder, Minerva CQ
11:05-11:45 | Company-specific Digital Assistants
Conversational systems specific to your company can be particularly effective because of the limited scope of what your customers are likely to ask. Many contacts can be resolved by handling Frequently Asked Questions, leaving more complex issues to agents. Over time, a company digital assistant can handle an increasing range of inquiries. This session discusses tools and platforms that can support creating company-specific conversational systems.
Moderator: Moderator: Marie Meteer, Senior Research Scientist, Pryon & President, AVIOS
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Conversation Not Just Speech!, Raj Tumuluri, CEO, Openstream.ai
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Avoiding the Road to Armageddon: Designing Conversational Experiences the Right Way, Vineet Mishra, Principal User Experience Designer, Oracle Conversational Design
1:00-1:40 | Personal Assistants: The New Web Portal?
The general personal assistants such as Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and Amazon Alexa are evolving into general web portals, acting as search engines to provide information or to connect with companies. All provide development tools and supporting technology that allows companies to continue a natural-language conversation controlled by the outside company. All companies must eventually converse through these new web portals, just as they must have a website to be credible today.
Moderator: Tom Schalk, VP, Voice Technology, SiriusXM
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Using Serverless Technologies to Build an Alexa Skill, Rohan Desai, Senior Software Engineer, Intuit
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Best Practices in Conversational AI, Lisa Falkson, Senior VUI Designer, Amazon
1:45-2:25 | Platforms for Conversational Applications
Conversational applications are more than the components, e.g., speech recognition, text-to-speech, getting answers, maintaining a dialog. The components all have to work together and have options for updating. Platforms that support a full solution can accelerate development.
Moderator: Alex Rudnicky, Professor Emeritus, Carnegie Mellon University
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Uniquely Branded Multistyle, Multitone, Mutilingual Speech Synthesis for Customer Experience Transformation, Fathy Yassa, CEO and Co-founder, Speech Morphing, Inc.
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Towards a Universal Language Between Voice AIs, Tobias Martens, Founder, whoelse.ai
2:30-3:30 | Automating Customer Service
Customer service isn't truly service if automation is frustrating or badly designed. Advances in conversational technology can reduce this frustration if delivered intelligently.
Moderator: Nancy Jamison, Industry Director Information Communication Technologies, Frost & Sullivan
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Your Contact Center is in the Cloud…Now What?, Robert Harris, President, Communications Advantage
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How Voice Technology Will Drive Business Communications, Lee Tannenbaum, Vice President of Strategic Accounts, LumenVox
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Creating Empathy at Scale, Shadi Baqleh, Chief Operating Officer, Deepgram
4:00-4:40 | The Impact of Conversational Technology
Conversational technology is the next major step beyond the Graphical User Interface, supplementing it and in some cases replacing it as it gets overburdened, particularly on the small screen of smartphones.
Moderator: Deborah Dahl, Principal, Conversational Technologies
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Digital Assistants and a Computer-Human Partnership: The Next Step in Evolution?, William Meisel, President, TMA Associates, and Executive Director, AVIOS
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Conversational Interaction: the Five Issues Holding Us Back from Exponential Growth, Jon Stine, Executive Director, Open Voice Network
4:45-5:45 | The Evolution of Conversational Technology
Conversational technology is a new frontier. Making it fully effective requires going beyond the core technology to a broader view.
Moderator: William Meisel, Executive Director AVIOS & President, TMA Associates
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Bridging the Gap between Chatbots and Question Answering, Marie Meteer, Senior Research Scientist, Pryon
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Onwards to Conversational Applications, Wolf Paulus, Adjunct Computer Science Professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
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Platform for Collaborative Multimodal Plan-Based Multiparty Dialogue Systems, Phil Cohen, Chief Scientist, Openstream.ai
5:45-7:00 | Networking Reception Sponsored by Openstream.ai, Pryon & Deepgram
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13TH
8:00-8:40 | Keynote talk: The Conversational Cloud: Foundations for The Voice Renaissance
Dan Miller, Lead Analyst-Founder, Opus Research
A new generation of developers and business people are super-excited at the prospect of building voice applications in “The Cloud”. They are riding a wave of investment and energy tied to Digital Transformation, Elastic Cloud Computing, and a messy set of processes and platforms called “Conversational AI”. In this Keynote Dan Miller, Lead Analyst and Founder of Opus Research describe how today’s initiatives are built on the strong foundation of much more familiar underpinnings and building blocks for both Conversational and Transactional Voice-based interactions.
8:45-9:45 | Best Practices in Building Conversational Applications
Experts provide guidance in developing effective solutions.
Moderator: Nancy Jamison, Industry Director Information Communication Technologies, Frost & Sullivan
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Beyond Personas: Relationships with Conversational Agents, Deborah Dahl, Principal, Conversational Technologies
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There'll be Some Moanin': User Transitions to Conversational Interfaces, Anna Wichansky, President, Anna Wichansky Associates
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Using Knowledge Engineering and Text Processing to Build Cognitive AI Applications, Seth Earley, CEO, Earley Information Science
9:50-10:50 | Building Effective Conversational Systems
A system isn't truly conversational if it is overly structured. This session highlights ways to built speech or text conversations.
Moderator: Tom Schalk, VP, Voice Technology, SiriusXM
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Conversation Strategies and Lessons Learned from a Large-Scale Healthcare Project, Simon Rapoport, CTO, AudioCodes
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Lucrative Conversational Commerce with New Chatbots, Felipe Hlibco, Developer Relations Engineer, Google
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Anthropomorphism in Chatbot Design and Development, Anna-Katharina Rausch, Unit Lead for Solutions Architecture in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, BIG PICTURE GmbH
10:55-11:55 | Case Studies 2
Speakers discuss what they learned and gained from deployments using conversational technology.
Moderator: Moderator: Marie Meteer, Senior Research Scientist, Pryon & President, AVIOS
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Empowering Well-Being Through Conversational Coaching for Active and Healthy Ageing, Michael McTear, Emeritus Professor, Ulster University
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Using Voice and Behavioral Matching AI to Serve Customers Better, Rana Gujral, CEO, Behavioral Signals
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Conversational AI Customer/Agent Experience Optimization, Monique Bozeman, Director of Product Marketing, KORE.ai
1:00-1:40 | Case Studies 3
Speakers discuss what they learned and gained from deployments using conversational technology.
Moderator: Alex Rudnicky, Professor Emeritus, Carnegie Mellon University
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Voice is the New App: A Global Bank Uses Conversational AI to Improve the Employee Experience for 15,000 Employees in 25 Countries, Dan Turchin, CEO, PeopleReign
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Designing AI Driven Voice Virtual Assistants for K-12 Students, Jyotirmay Gadewadikar, Chief Engineer & Principal, MITRE; Jennifer Kuczynski Lead Systems Engineer, Systems and Mission Analysis, MITRE
1:45-2:45 | Specialized Digital Assistants
Companies can communicate with customers through conversational digital assistants tailored to their products or services. Customers will increasingly be exposed to conversational systems, often through smartphones and home speakers Learn how tools and platforms can allow developing such conversational systems quickly without a research project.
Moderator: William Meisel, Executive Director AVIOS & President, TMA Associates
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REATA: A Privacy-Preserving Vocal Personal Digital Assistant, Gérard Chollet, Consultant, Speech Morphing
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The New Normal: Empowering Customers through Synthesis of Human and Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Lisa Michaud, Product Director for the Intelligent Virtual Assistant platform, Interactions LLC
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Digital Assistant Throwdown, Shyamala Prayaga, Senior Software Product Manager, Conversational AI: Deep Learning, Nvidia
3:00-3:40 | Speech Recognition Technology: Speech-to-Text
Speech recognition can convert speech to text for direct use in entering information without typing—dictation. It can also maintain a spoken conversation in a conversational system by converting speech to text that can be analyzed using NLP technology. Examples and best practices will be discussed.
Moderator: William Meisel, Executive Director AVIOS & President, TMA Associates
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From "Not Good enough" to Mass Adoption, and What's Next, Brian Garr, GM, Garr AI
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Reduce Your Speech Transcription Costs by 90%, Tom Spencer, Senior Manager, Product Marketing, Achronix
3:45-4:30 | Relating to a Conversational System
Conversational technology can some of the warmth of dealing with a skilled agent. What are some of the ways we can create that warmth?
Moderator: Deborah Dahl, Principal, Conversational Technologies
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Bringing User Trust to Voice Assistance: Why, Where, and How, Jon Stine, Executive Director, Open Voice Network
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Relation in the Virtual Grid: A Digital Dialog, Nava Shaked, Head of Multidisciplinary School, Product Marketing, Holon Institute of Technology