VUX World

Microsoft has a range of AI services to help brands and individuals create seamless conversational experiences. From large scale enterprise assistants, such as the solutions in play at Swisscom and the BBC, to small scale services too. With MS Build just around the corner, we get a sneak peak at what to expect from the Azure Bot Services team, as well as a rundown on just exactly what bot services Microsoft has to offer, how they all hang together, who they're for and how you can use them. 

We're joined by Senior Program Manager in Conversational AI, Gary Pretty, and Senior Designer in Conversational AI, Quirine van Walt Meijer, Microsoft, to discuss the above, as well as some best practice for conversational design and strategic pointers on how to successfully implement conversational AI in your industry.

Links

Register for MS Build

Tune in to Gary Pretty's sessions at MS Build

Connect with Gary Pretty

Connect with Quirine van Walt Meijer

Sign up for the VUX World and Microsoft deep dive webinar 

Try Composer here

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Microsoft has a range of AI services to help brands and individuals create seamless conversational experiences. From large scale enterprise assistants, such as the solutions in play at Swisscom and the BBC, to small scale services too. With MS Build just around the corner, we get a sneak peak at what to expect from the Azure Bot Services team, as well as a rundown on just exactly what bot services Microsoft has to offer, how they all hang together, who they're for and how you can use them. 

We're joined by Senior Program Manager in Conversational AI, Gary Pretty, and Senior Designer in Conversational AI, Quirine van Walt Meijer, Microsoft, to discuss the above, as well as some best practice for conversational design and strategic pointers on how to successfully implement conversational AI in your industry.

Links

Register for MS Build

Tune in to Gary Pretty's sessions at MS Build

Connect with Gary Pretty

Connect with Quirine van Walt Meijer

Sign up for the VUX World and Microsoft deep dive webinar 

Try Composer here

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we speak to Laetitia Cailleteau, Managing Director | DATA & AI Europe Lead | Global Lead for Conversational AI at Accenture, about the origins of the patent, the problem it solves, the value of personalised voice experiences and more about what Accenture is up to in AI, and how its thinking about conversational AI's potential to transfer customer experience.

Links

Connect with Laetitia Cailleteau on LinkedIn

More about Accenture

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We take it for granted that, when we talk to our voice assistants, they hear us. When we dictate a message to Siri, it transcribes it. Speech recognition is used in a whole manner of areas beyond voice assistants, too. Transcribing videos on YouTube, PowerPoint, dictation, call transcriptions in contact centres and beyond. But speech recognition systems don't always perform as expected and require training constantly to address bias, new language and dialects.

There are many cases, however, where speech recognition systems either fail, or need training. For example, training speech recognition models to remove bias is a core priority for all speech recognition providers today. Studies have shownthat the major ASR players technologies perform poorly when used by black people, as compared to white people, for example. Addressing this performance gap is of upmost importance.

Another reason for training ASR systems is expansion into other countries and to cater to other languages and accents. When Amazon, for example, aims to launch Alexa in, say, Brazil, it needs to train its speech recognition models in the Brazilian language, dialect and accents. Understanding languages, accents and dialects is a core part of making AI accessible to the world, as well as for commercial expansion.

Finally, companies need to continue training ASR systems to make sure that new vocabularies and phrases that enter a given language are understood. Prior to 2020, the world wasn't saying the phrases 'COVID', 'COVID 19', 'SARS COV 2' half as much. A few year's prior, Tik Tok wasn't a thing. Language changes, and so ASR systems need to change with it.

In this episode, we chat to Esteban Gorupicz, CEO, and Alejandro Heredia, Technology Business Development and Sales, at Atexto about how they help ASR companies train speech recognition systems and tackle the above problems.

Atexto is one of the world's leading providers in speech recognition training. It's platform allows ASR providers to crowd source training data for speech recognition systems, label and tag the data, then export it to feed into its models. It also has an ASR benchmarking tool, which allows providers to compare performance across ASR systems.

Links

Check out Atexto

Find out about the ASR World Championships

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Swisscom, Switzerland's largest telco, has one of the most widespread uses of conversational AI we've seen to date. With voice-enabled set-top-boxes, customer service-based chat and messaging applications, as well as a voice-enabled IVR system for call routing, Swisscom is all-in on voice and conversational AI. Roger Dill heads up the Dialogue Management, AI and ML product and has scaled its efforts from a single chatbot, to a sophisticated multichannel suite of conversational capabilities. 

Artificial Solutions, the company behind Microsoft-LUIS-powered voice development platform, Teneo, has seen its fair share of enterprise conversational AI deployments. CEO Per Ottosson, formerly IPSoft Amelia, is well versed in the conversational AI space and, given that he's been involved in countless enterprise voice and conversational AI rollouts, including that of Swisscom, has unique perspectives into the trends, strategies and direction of the market. 

Hear from both Per and Roger about what it takes to scale conversational AI across the business. We cover areas such as:

• Organisational skills and team requirements
• Quantifying and measuring success and the challenges surrounding that
• Swisscom's approach to its technology architecture and its modular approach
• Artificial Solutions' approach to tooling and why developers are key to successful conversational AI deployments
• Challenges you'll face when scaling solutions
• Considerations for those getting started
• And much, much, much more

Links

Connect with Per Ottosson and Roger Dill on Linkedin

Try Teneo

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Sam Danby of Boost.ai joins us to share how to take your conversational AI to the next level using Boost technology, including creating conversational agents from web content, assessing and choosing the right technology such as ASR and NLU, as well as learning and iterating on language models.

Links

Follow Sam on Twitter and connect on LinkedIn

Visit Boost.ai

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Marie Kleinert and Ray-Allen Taylor of VUI Agency join us to share some of the methodologies and practices they use to create charismatic voice assistants and how you can do the same.

We dive into areas such as:

• Defining charisma from a voice assistant perspective
• TTS tuning and challenges
• The value of creating a persona
• The importance of linguistics in conversation design
• When and how to create charisma
• How charisma contributes to improving customer experience

Check out VUI.agency

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Google Cloud's Head of Conversational AI and Contact Center, Antony Passemard, joins us to dive under the hood of Google CCAI; Google's Contact Centre AI product.

Antony manages the entire product suite and joins us to share what CCAI is, how it's being used to improve customer experience within contact centres across industries, as well as describing how you can use the tools yourself to streamline service delivery using conversational AI.

00:00:00 Intro

00:02:53 About Antony Passemard

00:04:16 Does CCAI have a relationship with Google Assistant?

00:06:35 Overview of CCAI

00:07:20 What drove the need for DialogFlow CX?

00:10:42 Can you move from ES to CX?

00:11:50 Who is CX for?

00:13:00 Core reasons for using DialogFlow CX vs ES

00:17:30 Michael Kenny: Will DF CX open up third part integrations for CMS etc?

00:19:40 What has CCAI taken from Google Research?

00:23:13 BERT: what's it being used for?

00:26:10 What is Agent Assist?

00:28:50 What does Agent Assist look like and where is it?

00:31:04 How is Agent Assist implemented?

00:35:00 How will Agent Assist improve over time?

00:37:05 How do you approach feature building and roll out?

00:41:00 Focus on successful conversations

00:42:50 Can you implement Agent Assist on your own?

00:47:00 How to implement DialogFlow into contact centres

00:52:35 Insights

00:57:00 Can you use Insights to find and prioritise use cases?

00:58:35 How to measure successful conversations

01:05:05 How to find out more

Find out more about Google CCAI

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Voicebots for customer service are in increasing demand, but how do you actually integrate one into a contact centre?

Learn how to take an existing chatbot and repurpose it for your contact centre. Many chatbots provide immense value to customers, and many call centres are overwhelmed with demand. Why not offer your chatbot service through your contact centre and help customers self serve, and customer service staff manage demand.

Joining us this week is Ilan Avner, Director of Product Management at AudioCodes. Ilan will share how any brand or developer who has existing conversational AI implementations can scale those conversations into ANY contact centre system.

We discuss the challenges you'll face when trying to integrate bots into contact centres including how to deal with on-premise vs cloud deployments, security, protocols and standards, timescales and costs. We'll also cover how you can avoid all of the completely by using the AudioCodes Voice AI Connect product.

A truly enlightening conversation for anyone who's interested in the practicalities of integrating any kind of bot into contact centres for improving self service and customer experience.

Check out the AudioCodes Voice AI Connect

Catch up on the AudioCodes webinar with Vodafone

Connect with Ilan Avner on LinkedIn

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As much as voice technology has been hyped over the last few years, perhaps leading to some unrealistic expectations, it's beginning to find its feet in reliably and consistently improving customer service in contact centres. 

Regardless of hype, voice technology has super-human qualities when applied in a customer services environment and especially, according to today's guest Nikola Mrkšić, CEO and co-founder of London-based PolyAI, when using PolyAI technology.

We chat to Nikola about what defines 'super-human' qualities for voice assistants, how the PolyAI technology differs from some of the common providers, why drag and drop tools have limitations, and understand Nikola's perspective on the voice industry overall.

Visit PolyAI

Follow Nikola Mrkšić on Twitter or LinkedIn

Webinar on multilingual voice assistants

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