We're joined by David Clark (BT) and Tim Atkinson (Google) to discuss the future of conversational commerce: RCS Messaging.

SPONSORED BY THE CONVERSATION DESIGN INSTITUTE

Companies around the world are looking for conversation designers, a rare breed of people to help them advance communication between people and AI. That's where we help!

Conversation Design Institute leads in training and certification for Conversation Designers, Conversational Copywriters, and AI Trainers. Our human-centric workflow has proven itself around the world. Our certificates ensure you create winning conversational experiences.

As advocates for the Conversation Design profession, we continue to work closely with tech partners, agencies and other key players in the industry. With this support, Conversation Design Institute is well on its way to becoming the number one platform in conversation design.

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Learn what RCS messaging is, and why it's set to enable the next level of two-way, automated B2C communication.

Use it to scale your customer service, generate leads, fulfil self service transactions and generate revenue.

In this episode of VUX World Live, we're going to dive into the ins and outs of RCS messaging: what it is, where it came from, why it's important, who can use it and how you can implement automated, authenticated, trusted conversational agents today.

Already being used by millions of BT customers, the messaging market awaits. And, with over 90% open rates within the first 5 minutes of a message being sent, what's not to love?

Here, we dive deep into what all of this means for the future of business communication.

RBM developer site: build RBM campaigns and agents

Register to the RBM developer event 4th November 2020

Businesses wanting to use RCS as part of a multichannel strategy can contact BT

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In this episode, we're joined by Constant Companion CEO, Mark Gray, to discuss the opportunities and need for creating voice-first services for older adults.

Constant Companion are providing voice OS access to care homes, retirement centres and individuals across the US, with demand for its services increasing exponentially this year. For a small monthly fee, your gran, grandad, parent or friend, can have an Alexa-enabled device installed and set up in their home that runs on top of the Constant Companion OS.

Make calls, automate tasks, stay connected, be entertained, all safely and securely behind military-grade security. What else would you expect from Mark Gray, career-long cyber security expert.

Mark join us this week to share the opportunities that exist in providing accessible, voice-based services to older adults. With an ageing population of folks who don't think of themselves as 'old', and that hold almost 80% of America's disposable income, what can you create for these voice tech-adopting, connection craving early adopters?

Constant Companion

Mark Gray on LinkedIN

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Algolia announced a suite of AI products that help make the search experience more natural and simpler, as well as adding immense power to chat bots and voice bots.

In this episode, we run through the new updates and discuss their importance and usefulness for the voice industry.

We discuss:

The new API from Algolia that offers Alexa-like natural language understanding. Understand your users’ intents, increase conversion - in search experiences, or anywhere else.

Algolia Answers finds not just the document, but the exact answer that best responds to the searcher’s question. Q&A adds real-world semantic knowledge to tunable textual relevance to find answers deep within unstructured content.

Let AI learn from how your users rewrite their queries to suggest synonyms, so next time they don’t have to rewrite.

Find out more

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What happens when you serve audio adverts to smart speaker listeners and ask them to make a charitable donation right there and then on their smart speaker, using their voice? Say It Now CEO, Charlie Cadbury, joins us to share the answer.

Amazon forecast voice commerce to be a $3.2billion market by 2022. That's not far away. And, during lockdown, in the UK, voice shopping rose from 22% up to 33% of smart speaker owners.

I'll say that again: 33% of smart speaker owners in the UK say they have used their smart speaker for shopping this summer.

Say It Now were one of the few lucky companies to be awarded Innovate UK funding to use technology to provide solutions to some of the core challenges brought about by Covid-19.

One of those challenges is that charities across the country, organisations that survive on the kind donations of the public, took a huge hit. Donations are plummeting and some of the most vulnerable people in the country are at risk of missing out on vital support because charities are struggling to keep the lights on.

In collaboration with DAX and a host of charities, Say It Now were awarded the funding to do the following: run adverts on smart speakers to raise awareness of the need for donations, and offer users a way of donating via their smart speaker.

The campaign launched a couple of weeks ago and the data is starting to roll in. Is it working? Can voice advertising increase charitable donations? And what does that mean for the potential of voice commerce?

Join us on VUX World Live, with Charlie Cadbury, to find out.

Say It Now website

Charlie Cadbury on LinkedIn

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Learn how to design chatbots the Salesforce way. We're joined by Greg Bennett, Conversation Design Principal, Salesforce, to discuss how Salesforce approach designing conversations for chatbots for their clients.

With 70% of people claiming they wouldn't use a chatbot again after a single bad experience, it's more important than ever to create conversations that build trust and deliver what user's need.

So how does Salesforce do that? How do you build trust through dialogue design? And how do you make sure that your chatbot can deliver on the core things your users need? Let's find out.

We'll also dive into the Einstein Bot Builder and find out what kind of use cases Salesforce clients are exploring and what kind of value they're finding from leveraging the combination of conversational AI and CRM technologies.

Whether you're a conversation designer looking to keep abreast of the latest methodologies or a marketer/strategist looking to find value in conversational AI, this episode of VUX World will dive deep to help you achieve just that.

Join Greg on LinkedIn

Email Greg

Greg's website

Greg on Medium

Txting, the gr8 deb8

The stuff of thought 

That’s not what I meant

How we talk

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After covering the top new Alexa features for marketers and the top features for developers, we were getting a lot of questions from the community about the new Alexa features announced during Alexa Live 2020. So, what better way to dive deep into them than by sitting down with someone who had a hand in creating a great deal of them.

Paul Cutsinger is known within the voice community for being one of the first Alexa developer evangelists and teaching people all over the world how to build skills. Now, he's moved into more of a product role where he brings the next most needed features to the platform.

In this live podcast episode, we chatted to Paul about his role and dove deep into the ins and outs of some of the best and newest Alexa features for designers, developers and marketers, as well as fielded questions from the audience on skill building best practice.

Links

Amazon Alexa Skills Kit

Alexa Skills Challenge: Alexa Conversations

Follow Paul on LinkedIn and Twitter

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Ron Jaworski, CEO Trinity Audio, joins us to share how to satisfy the user, the publisher and the advertiser with your audio strategy.

Trinity Audio's philosophy is to satisfy users, publishers and advertisers in an attempt to provide value to all three with audio. 

Trinity Audio's technology turns any webpage into audio using text to speech and allows publishers to then distribute that on their websites, as well as through any other audio channel, such as Spotify, podcast players, Flash Briefings, via an RSS feed. With ads built-in, publishers can repurpose existing content, distribute it in a variety of channels to reach more users, whilst generating incremental revenue at the same time. 

Your content strategy should have a Holy Trinity also: written, video and audio. Most publishers have the first two covered, but have been slow to start their audio revolution. 

In this episode, Ron Jaworski, CEO of Trinity Audio joins us to share how you can boost your audio strategy and get started in the right way. We discuss the current capability of Trinity, the future of real time audio production with AI for folly and SFX, and the value of bringing audio to your users. 

A shocking amount of people on the planet can't read of write, but they can listen. Many live in countries where the native tongue is a second language and tradition written comms doesn't land half as well as audio can. 

Through utilising an effective audio strategy, not only are you making your content available in more mediums to reach more users, you're also making your content available to those who would otherwise be excluded. 

Learn how to make your content available to those that need it, how to distribute your existing content into more channels and how to earn incremental revenue while you do it in this episode of VUX World Live.

Trinity Audio

Trinity Audio on LinkedIN

Twitter

YouTube

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Einav Itamar is the founder and CEO of Voca.ai, a technology company specialising in IVR automation using conversational AI. He joins Dustin and Kane to chat about how to create human-like conversations for IVR bots, the impact of coronavirus on call centre demand and how organisations are approaching automating incoming call centre calls with AI.

Need help with call centre automation? Book a free 20 minute consultation.

One thing is for sure: Covid-19 hit call centres hard.

Some saw the frailty of legacy systems and infrastructure that require you to be fixed at a desk. They had to close completely, unable to work remotely.

Some could enable operatives to work from home, but they were snowed under with a barrage of calls. For some, it was well in excess of double call volumes.

A few realised what was happening and acted. They implemented (or increased their usage of) conversational AI.

Find out how they did, and how you can create human-like, automated conversations that allow you to increase self-service and scale your demand management with Einav Eitamar, CEO, Voca.ai.

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SPONSORED BY PROJECT VOICE CATALYST

Project Voice Catalyst is for companies working with voice and AI, whether heavily involved or just starting, it uses an extensive network to connect companies working with voice tech and conversational AI to new customers, partners, media, or investors, depending on needs and business objectives.

Accelerating your business months ahead of where you otherwise would be.

No matter what industry - publishing, healthcare, automotive, banking, gaming, hospitality - Project Voice: Catalyst is helping others and can help you.

Contact Ray Kyle, Score Publishing's Director of Business Development, at [email protected] or (781) 929 1098 if you're interested in learning more.

Most contact centres have been overwhelmed during the covid period, struggling to meet the demand placed on them. Some call centres have even had to close due to unprecedented call volumes.

At the same time, customers are ever more demanding. Expectations are through the roof. No one wants to wait on hold, and everyone wants to speak to a human. When they eventually get through to speak to someone, their query isn't always answered first time. Sometimes they're passed to and from between departments which makes for a less than desirable experience.

At the same time, call handlers and agents don't always have what they need to serve customers properly. They're sometimes dealing with multiple systems and have to start each call with information gathering, rather than problem solving.

Conversational AI can be used to solve all of these problems. From gathering information while the customer waits, and passing that information to call handlers so that they can spend more time serving and less time gathering details, to end-to-end self service from within the call, negating the need to speak to an agent in the first place.

Speakeasy AI have patent-pending technology built to make the lives of customers and contact centres easy. And in this episode of VUX World Live, The Fresh Prince of AI and CEO Speakeasy AI, Frank Schneider, makes a return to the show to share insights on how voice technology is being used within IVR systems to help solve some real business problems, and how you can do the same.

speakeasyai.com

[email protected]

All about Speakeasy AI with the Fresh Prince of AI, Frank Schneider

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Project Voice Catalyst is for companies working with voice and AI, whether heavily involved or just starting, it uses an extensive network to connect companies working with voice tech and conversational AI to new customers, partners, media, or investors, depending on needs and business objectives.

Accelerating your business months ahead of where you otherwise would be.

No matter what industry - publishing, healthcare, automotive, banking, gaming, hospitality - Project Voice: Catalyst is helping others and can help you.

Contact Ray Kyle, Score Publishing's Director of Business Development, at [email protected] or (781) 929 1098 if you're interested in learning more.[/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row]

We first spoke about multi modal design with Jan König of Jovo on one of the very first episodes of the VUX World podcast. Back then, Jan described Jovo's vision for a multi modal future, where the best interface is the closest interface you have to hand, whether that's your watch, your headphones, your speaker or you phone. And that the experience you have with your assistant should depend on the device you're using. Context should be carried across devices and modalities so that your experience remains personalised, yet tuned to the device you're using.

In 2018, this was merely a vision. Google Assistant existed on Android and in a smart speaker and almost all design was contained to the audible conversation.

Since then, Google Assistant has exploded. It's on over 1 billion devices of all shapes and sizes. Yes, it still runs on Android, and on Google's line of Nest smart speakers. But it's also now on iOS, on Nest Hub smart displays, car head units, headphones, smart home objects, watches, TVs, all in over 30 languages. And it's expanding into new environments with new languages seemingly every couple of month.

Jan's vision has been brought to life by Google.

How, then, does Google make sure that the experience of using Google Assistant is consistent across device types? How does a screen change the dynamics of the interaction? How does the context of someone being outside wearing headphones impact design choices? And how should the experience differ and grow over time?

Then there's the fact that Google doesn't control where Google Assistant lives. Any manufacturer can put Google Assistant into any device and potentially create new contextual environments and new multi modal dynamics. How do you manage that?

Daniel Padgett, Head of Conversation Design at Google, joins us on the show this week to explain.

Conversation design guidance from Google

Google's design principles at design.google

Wired for speech by Clifford Nass and Scott Brave

The man who lied to his laptop by Clifford Nass

Designing voice user interfaces by Cathy Pearl

Voice user interface design by James Giangola and Jennifer Balogh

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