How do you truly measure the quality of the customer experience you are delivering? How do you know you’re getting better? Amazon and Google know that the answers to these questions involve helping customers get stuff done as quickly as possible. Task completion gets you in the right ballpark, but it is speed that wins you the game of excellent customer experience. This keynote stresses how the relentless pursuit of customer convenience drives customer loyalty, retention, and revenue growth. Learn how to speed to success by measuring your results.

New conversational dialogue platforms are based on state-ofthe- art machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. The platform learns from examples provided by developers and end-user conversations to continuously improve user experience. These solutions are built across platforms, allowing companies and organizations to instantly expand their reach to new audiences. We also showcase innovative use cases demonstrated from early adopters in this rapidly growing area.

How does conversational AI play in the video game industry? Learn and see the current and future uses of conversational AI in the virtual reality and gaming worlds. This session includes multiple demos and looks at AI platforms for gaming.

Imagine if you could hire someone who learns quickly. Someone who is always available (24x7x365), doesn’t require overtime pay, and will never ask for a wage increase. Someone who could not only help scale your service organization, but could also make your existing employees better at their jobs. Sound too good to be true? It’s not! Learn how a digital employee can provide immense value to organizations by managing repetitive tasks, freeing agents to focus on higher-value customer-centric activities, improving the routing of questions to answers, changing the dynamic of how you manage your workforce, and much more.

This presentation looks at several problems in developing conversational applications, including a lack of training data, scarce developer resources, and the complexities of multi-lingual applications. Learn how organizations overcome these challenges to build intelligent contextual conversational understanding into their AI, including how to understand obscure questions, such as, “Did he win the little gold statue?”

With VR/AR user interfaces, we leave behind the 2D communication of the mouse pad as we move toward saying exactly what we mean or want. Once used to “talking” with Siri or Alexa, users tend to use voice elsewhere. Chatbots seem to be a transitional step to a future where we “talk” to services. This presentation focuses on voice vs. chat user interfaces and introduces attributes of good chatbot user interfaces.

Do-it-yourself IVR development promises complete control over the product, flexibility, consistency within the industry, and opportunity to create complex solutions that solve real-world problems without outsourcing development. In addition, organizations will have the in-house skills to maintain and improve the IVR system. Important aspects for IVR developers include developing a plan for success, using free toolkits, and reusing prebuilt code. This panel discusses how to get started, how to identify how far you can go it alone, and when to call in the experts.

See presentations about some of the latest technological developments in speech technology from companies at the conference. Solution Sessions are open to all full conference attendees and Discovery Pass holders. Session details will be posted shortly, so check back soon. Follow #SpeechTEK on Twitter for updates.

Enterprises today are faced with both challenges and opportunities when it comes to Intelligent Assistants and their customers that consume them. Enterprises want an Intelligent Assistant that extends the brand and is consistent with across all channels. Consumers want to get their problems solved quick and efficiently -- but how do you do both? Join our session to learn about trends in customers care and the challenges and opportunities both enterprises and consumers are facing today.

This session describes how to engage and guide clients through digital transformation. What are the costs, security implications, and other special considerations when designing virtual assistants? How can you architect a configurable and reusable virtual assistant pipeline using open source tools and APIs? How can you enhance virtual assistant intelligence with search, recommendation, and semantic technologies? See a live demonstration of an omni-channel digital campsite booking experience. The demo seamlessly moves from the Amazon Echo to a web-based chatbot and then to a mobile phone assistant.

This presentation describes how to create a technical framework and vision for customer journeys in an omni-channel environment using IVR, mobile apps, text, and chat-based interactions. It also looks at how to own the micro-moment (defined as the instant when customers determine preferences and make decisions). See real-world examples of how companies deploy the technology, services, solutions, and platforms needed to bring next-generation customer journeys to life with insights attendees can readily apply to their own enterprises.

Imagine if you could hire someone who learns quickly. Someone who is always available (24x7x365), doesn’t require overtime pay, and will never ask for a wage increase. Someone who could not only help scale your service organization, but could also make your existing employees better at their jobs. Sound too good to be true? It’s not! Learn how a digital employee can provide immense value to organizations by managing repetitive tasks, freeing agents to focus on higher-value customer-centric activities, improving the routing of questions to answers, changing the dynamic of how you manage your workforce, and much more.

Everyone is talking about digital self-service—omni-channel, mobile, chatbots, AI, etc. Companies need a solid foundation before they begin adding the latest bells and whistles to meet the digital customer (millennial or not) at eye level. This talk shows examples of how existing IVR systems can be enhanced to introduce advanced concepts such as context continuity, caller intent prediction, and adaptive intelligence, while using channels, such as SMS, to improve the effectiveness of IVR.

Digital presence includes virtual agents, chatbots, and chat agents that can pick up a conversation with context and deflect some calls away from the call center. However, deflection is often oversimplified, and usability is often overlooked. We explore use cases for a deflection to a digital channel and learn about the usability aspects of these experiences. We discuss good and poor use cases, as well as what constitutes a useful transition experience.

When users fail to obtain the information they need from websites or IVR systems, they try chat. Customers expect to obtain the same, up-to-date information from all channels. A design to optimize success in self-service includes a conversational interface and multiple understanding resources. Digital virtual assistants should assist the customer journey at every step, not steer them down a different path.

See presentations about some of the latest technological developments in speech technology from companies at the conference. Solution Sessions are open to all full conference attendees and Discovery Pass holders. Session details will be posted shortly, so check back soon. Follow #SpeechTEK on Twitter for updates.

Don’t be a casualty of the digital revolution. Learn how you can develop a strategy that lets you adopt new technologies at your own pace, measure their success, and make necessary adjustments—without putting your brand at risk. This session will feature a live demonstration of an omnichannel technology implementation.

Current intelligent agents (IAs) are limited to specific domains. However, people often engage in activities that span multiple domains and have to manage context and information transfer on their own. An ideal personal IA would be able discover such (recurring) activities and learn their structure, to support interaction with the user. The result would be custom applications supporting personal activities. We discuss our work creating agents that autonomously configure spoken language interfaces for this purpose.

In today’s digital age, customers expect immediate and accurate results, even when the request is phrased with natural language. By using artificial intelligence, virtual assistants can not only provide highly accurate responses and carry-out repetitive transactions, but also can change in context and respond accordingly. Conversational chatbot, complex requests today can easily be understood and broken into several steps to create a strong self-service experience

Imagine if you could hire someone who learns quickly. Someone who is always available (24x7x365), doesn’t require overtime pay, and will never ask for a wage increase. Someone who could not only help scale your service organization, but could also make your existing employees better at their jobs. Sound too good to be true? It’s not! Learn how a digital employee can provide immense value to organizations by managing repetitive tasks, freeing agents to focus on higher-value customer-centric activities, improving the routing of questions to answers, changing the dynamic of how you manage your workforce, and much more.

Conversational digital assistants and bots ease customers’ contact with a company and are increasingly as important as a website. However, there are many alternatives: voice or text-based “bots” for messenger services or independent digital assistants delivered by website or mobile app. This talk outlines a structure and series of questions a company should ask to evaluate these alternatives, producing an effective result for both the company and its customers with the most efficient development process.

Intelligent assistants are becoming pervasive as consumers use them as an interface to their mobile device or connected home. Should you create your own branded intelligent assistant? What are the major trends with intelligent assistants? How is the market for intelligent assistants maturing? Should you create a single intelligent assistant that is accessible across a variety of channels? What technologies are involved in creating an IA? How do you get started?

VUI design as a discipline has been largely shrouded in mystery - a veritable black box of expertise understood by few but intriguing to many. But as voice interactions and conversational interfaces are quickly becoming an essential component of every service and product, how do you make good VUI design available to all developers? We present a strategy for cultivating VUI excellence across our entire industry’s ecosystem via scalable knowledge transfer and tools for developers and describe what we’ve learned while making designers out of thousands of developers.

See presentations about some of the latest technological developments in speech technology from companies at the conference. Solution Sessions are open to all full conference attendees and Discovery Pass holders. Session details will be posted shortly, so check back soon. Follow #SpeechTEK on Twitter for updates.

In conjunction with the presentation of the case study by Royal Bank of Canada, Omilia will be showcasing a live demonstration of its omni-channel conversational platform and discussing the business and technical KPI's and metrics used to measure performance and ROI.

We examine privacy and ethics for emerging automation. When you accept assistance, whether it be from a banker, mechanic, or fish salesman, there is always an open question of who gains what from the transaction. It is important to assess whose side your automated assistant will take. Military drones and driverless vehicles already participate in life-and-death decisions. Soon, they’ll be joined by social robots providing services such as eldercare and childcare. Should we be concerned?

As Google Home, Amazon Echo, Apple TV, Jibo, and many more enter our homes, how will people cope with different product lexicons, interaction steps, speaking styles, knowledgebases, and known/unknown capabilities? Will digital butlers become “translators” for sets of commands to the less-gifted devices and have the ability to reassemble the collected information into sentences that are easy for people to understand? Will a more pervasive use of conversational interfaces with digital assistants expose users’ private ideas, intentions, and desires kill the little privacy that people still control?”

Imagine if you could hire someone who learns quickly. Someone who is always available (24x7x365), doesn’t require overtime pay, and will never ask for a wage increase. Someone who could not only help scale your service organization, but could also make your existing employees better at their jobs. Sound too good to be true? It’s not! Learn how a digital employee can provide immense value to organizations by managing repetitive tasks, freeing agents to focus on higher-value customer-centric activities, improving the routing of questions to answers, changing the dynamic of how you manage your workforce, and much more.

Learn about the latest advances in speech recognition, speaker recognition event detection using deep learning, and other new techniques. This presentation demonstrates a system which takes any media and splits it into segments, labeling each segment with the corresponding speaker. It also transcribes what was said in the media, providing timestamps for each segment. Other advances include bird song recognition, recognition of cockpit commands, and more.

Deep learning, large datasets, and faster computers enable extraction about the characteristics of the speaker, including the speaker language, identity (if they have called before), gender, age, and emotional state with a high level of accuracy from a few seconds of audio recordings. This capability marks the development of a new era in emotionally intelligent dialogue. The presentation concludes with a demonstration and some example use cases.

This session reviews the latest breakthroughs in deep learning for speech recognition and natural language processing, how to take advantage of big data to create better models, and how to apply speech and NLP models on massive amounts of data. We review the history of deep learning, its impact, recent breakthroughs, interesting solved and open problems, and its future.

See presentations about some of the latest technological developments in speech technology from companies at the conference. Solution Sessions are open to all full conference attendees and Discovery Pass holders. Session details will be posted shortly, so check back soon. Follow #SpeechTEK on Twitter for updates.

Anthem Healthcare was at a crossroads – they needed to scale their abilities and be more agile, but did not want to sacrifice quality. This session will cover how Anthem Healthcare (partnered with Empirix) was able to “shift left” with their development team, leveraging automation to increase application coverage, reduce regression test cycles, and limit rework and miscommunications during test case creation. Learn best practices to select tools that empower your abilities to help your contact center power forward.

Join your peers as we celebrate the grand opening of the Customer Solutions Expo. Visit with conference sponsors, exhibitors, speakers, and other attendees while enjoying light hors d’oeuvres and drinks. Open to all conference attendees including Discovery Pass holders and Exhibits-Only.