Natural language understanding allows users to express their intentions naturally, in their own words, while communicating with automated systems. It is widely used in the call center, where it has been demonstrated to increase customer satisfaction and to improve routing accuracy. Natural language understanding is also available in personal assistants, both general personal assistants such as Siri, Cortana, and Google Now, as well as enterprise virtual assistants. In addition, natural language understanding is increasingly being applied in a wide variety of newer environments, including ambient devices such as Amazon Echo, robots, and the Internet of Things. Learn the basics of natural language understanding technology and the issues in the design and implementation of systems that incorporate natural language understanding. Review tools and options for natural language understanding technology. Attendees can work with online natural language systems and see them in action. Bring your laptops.

This workshop lays the foundation for understanding how conversations are made by exploring examples from real-world conversations. After learning the basics of how conversations work, participants practice creating conversational interactions in a range of domains. Special attention is given to the importance of defining the “character” people will interact with and the implications that has for the entire user experience. Aspects of conversation uncovered in this workshop are relevant not only for what we traditionally think of as conversational interfaces, but also for multimodal and service design.