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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.

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Moderator: William Meisel, Executive Director, AVIOS, and President, TMA Associates

  • Phil Cohen, Chief Scientist, Openstream.ai

  • David Nahamoo, Chief Technology Officer, Pryon

  • Natalie Rutgers, Head of Product, Deepgram

  • Tom Spencer, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Achronix Semiconductor

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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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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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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

  • Using Serverless Technologies to Build an Alexa Skill, Rohan Desai, Senior Software Engineer, Intuit

  • Best Practices in Conversational AI, Lisa Falkson, Senior VUI Designer, Amazon           

View talk descriptions

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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

  • Uniquely Branded Multistyle, Multitone, Mutilingual Speech Synthesis for Customer Experience Transformation, Fathy Yassa, CEO and Co-founder, Speech Morphing, Inc.

  • Towards a Universal Language Between Voice AIs, Tobias Martens, Founder, whoelse.ai

View talk descriptions

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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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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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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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5:45-7:00  | Networking Reception Sponsored by Openstream.ai, Pryon & Deepgram

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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.

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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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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. 

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Moderator: Tom Schalk, VP, Voice Technology, SiriusXM

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10:55-11:55  |  Case Studies 2

Speakers discuss what they learned and gained from deployments using conversational technology.​

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Moderator: Moderator: Marie Meteer, Senior Research Scientist, Pryon & President, AVIOS

View talk descriptions

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1:00-1:40  |  Case Studies 3

Speakers discuss what they learned and gained from deployments using conversational technology.

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Moderator: Alex Rudnicky, Professor Emeritus, Carnegie Mellon University

View talk descriptions

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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

View talk descriptions

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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

View talk descriptions

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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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