Yvonne Zgraggen is a Product Owner in the Data, Analytics and AI division at Swisscom, a major telco provider in Switzerland. With a background in computer linguistics, UX and conversation design, Yvonne has a wealth of experience that anyone working on conversational AI systems can learn from.

Today, Yvonne joins us to share how Swisscom is approaching conversational process automation and top lessons learned from being a Product Owner for conversational applications.

00:00 Introduction and presenting Unparsed event use VUXWORLD and save 50% or visit the Unparsed website and proceed to the checkout https://unparsedconf.com/discount/VUX...

05:05 Welcome Yvonne

07:22 Computer linguistics

08:40 Starting at Swisscom

10:42 Early AI use cases

13:39 Product Ownership

17:20 Balancing requirements

20:11 Stakeholder feature management

22:30 Data & privacy

24:50 From conversation designer to product owner

32:23 Educating stakeholders

34:34 The new 'hype cycle': Chat GPT

38:58 Automating business processes

44:28 Conversational UI's

47:28 Advice to conversational AI practitioners

48:40 Outro

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Let’s talk about proactive messaging!

Michelle Parayil, Conversation Design Manager at Haptik, knows all about it. She’s learnt a great deal about proactive messaging with conversational AI, and shares her learnings and experiences. 

When’s the best time to do proactive messaging? How do we avoid a notification pile-up when sending chat messages proactively? Can a bot that’s too proactive create a bad user experience? It’s all in there, and more…

A wee note about this episode: Michelle called while she was in the middle of a thunderstorm! That’s dedication for you. There’s a few booms and bangs in the background, but she’s still loud and clear. Hope you enjoy it.

00:00 Start

02:08 What's the most useful thing you use at work?

03:22 How do you select the right use case?

04:24 Should we aim for bots to mimic humans?

06:32 What is proactive messaging?

08:14 What are the challenges and benefits of proactive messaging?

11:30 Is there a danger of a notification pile-up?

13:30 Can proactive messaging be done 24/7?

15:26 Can an overly proactive bot create a terrible experience?

17:38 How does data influence the time when we message the user?

20:21 Are there different ways to interpret the user's explicit 'no' to proactive messaging?

23:05 How can a bot fallback if they proactively messaged at the wrong time?

24:31 When would you recommend to not use proactive messaging?

26:28 Does proactive messaging create a strong impression of the bot's persona?

27:21 In which channels do Haptik use proactive messaging?

30:59 What do you think is the future of proactive messaging?

33:13 Outro

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Let’s talk careers!

This Conversations2 is an interview with Hilary Hayes, who’s a conversation designer, multimodal interaction designer, teacher and mentor.

I reached out to Hilary in the hope she’d chat about career paths. Why? The job title ‘conversation designer’ is still relatively new, the industry is going through rapid transformation, and recently there were layoffs throughout the tech industry which affected many people, including conversation designers. Sadly, Hilary was one of those designers who got laid-off (she worked at Meta), however as you’ll see in this interview that’s absolutely their loss.

Hilary’s got a lot of insights from her years of experience, she’s not afraid to call out our industry’s issues, and she’s enthusiastic and supportive. I think all conversation designers can take a lot from her. We all wonder about our careers, so listen up for a nice wee chat about careers in conversation design!

00:00 Start

00:13 Introduction

00:51 On UXR 02:18 30 seconds, go!

04:00 The importance of data in conversation design

05:24 Nominate one conversation designer we should all know

07:42 What can designers do away from work to help them be better designers?

14:44 Do conversation designers need lots of life experience?

20:13 On getting certification as a conversation designer

22:11 Talking matters

24:34 What do you need to feel your career is on track?

27:13 We need to talk to each other to stay up to date

31:27 We need to learn from each other

32:17 On mentoring

32:54 UX designers moving into conversation design

35:52 LLMS in conversation design

39:26 AI mirrors us

43:03 Has the industry evolved the way you expected it to?

46:33 Assistants could schedule our lives but they don't yet

48:04 Bots using humans to exploit internet security

50:15 What areas of conversation design don't get enough attention in the industry?

51:22 Are conversational designs serving users well yet?

56:58 What do you hope to do next?

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Of all the industries that can and could utilize conversational AI, banking, insurance and the wider financial services sector has some of the biggest opportunities.

To walk us through the kinds of business problems faced by FSI companies, the types of use cases conversational AI is solving for, and to highlight some of the successes, value and lessons learned, I’m joined by Dave Schreffler, SVP Financial Services Sales - Kore.ai, and Peter Berbee SVP Financial Services Product - Kore.ai.

Join VUX World at the EU Chatbot Summit where we’ll be hosting a full day of enterprise AI best practice content, with the likes of Vodafone, Love Holidays, LNER and many more. We have a 30% DISCOUNT for you too: VUXEU23 to attend: https://theeuropeanchatbot.com/

Find out more about https://kore.ai/ and book a demo here - https://info.kore.ai/kore.ai-demo-req...

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Oh wow, is that the time?! VUX World has been going for 5 years!

For this episode of Conversations Squared the focus is on the man who's usually asking the questions - Kane Simms!

What's he learned in the past 5 years? Where's the industry headed? What about Alexa and Google Assistant? Listen to Kane's responses to these questions and more...

0:00 Intro

4:00 Conversations and listening

7:00 We need patience for conversational AI

9:00 30 seconds, go!

11:10 What surprised you most about the industry when you started VUX World?

17:45 What do the words 'artificial intelligence' make you think?

20:55 Can you summarise the developments you've seen in the last 5 years?

26:15 Channels for enterprise conversational AI

30:35 Was the timing bad for Alexa and Google Assistant?

33:00 What inspires you to keep going forward?

36:20 What excites Ben about the industry?

38:40 The potential of conversational AI

39:30 Outro 

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Invoca is leading the conversational intelligence charge. CEO Gregg Johnson joins me to dive deep into conversational intelligence, what it is, how it works and how businesses are utilising it, as well as the imperative role of context.

Visit: https://www.invoca.com/

Join VUX World at the EU Chatbot Summit where we’ll be hosting a full day of enterprise AI best practice content, with the likes of Vodafone, Love Holidays, LNER and many more. We have a 30% DISCOUNT for you too: VUXEU23 to attend: https://theeuropeanchatbot.com/

Find out more about Kore.ai and book a demo here - Kore.ai request demo

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Conversation analysis should be a part of every conversation design team’s workflow. You may be doing it already without realising exactly what it is.

I reached out to Dr Maria Aretoulaki to find out exactly what conversation analysis is, why it matters and how she would use it for a new project.

Maria is the Director at DialogCONNECTION Ltd and she works with GlobalLogic (a HITACHI Group company) where she’s SME for ML/AI, design-led and data-driven Voice & Conversational AI (VOCAI) and VUI and CUI Design, and a Coordinator of the Web3 and Blockchain CoE.

Maria is a true veteran of conversational AI, so it was fantastic to chat with her!

00:00 Start

00:20 Maria's Introduction

02:38 Maria's VUI experience

05:33 30 seconds, go!

07:01 On 'copywriting' as a term for conversation design

08:45 What would you call the craft of utterance writing?

12:18 what surprised you most when you started designing conversations?

15:04 Customers creatively swearing at bots

17:09 What is conversation analysis?

22:03 What is ontology?

26:33 Ontology of human experience

30:10 Where would you expect to use conversation analysis in a new project?

33:10 What would you look for in the data?

36:09 Are recordings better than transcriptions?

38:48 Do transcriptions give enough detail?

43:20 How much detail is enough?

44:48 TTS and voice talent

48:08 Should conversation analysis adapt to different modalities?

51:58 Are ontologies intents?

53:51 Where can people learn more about conversation analysis?

57:51 Where can people follow you?

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Matt Taylor, CEO, Knowbl, joins me to discuss the realities of building a conversational AI platform on top of LLMs from the ground up.

Visit https://knowbl.com/

Join VUX World at the EU Chatbot Summit where we’ll be hosting a full day of enterprise AI best practice content, with the likes of Vodafone, Love Holidays, LNER and many more. We have a 30% DISCOUNT for you too: VUXEU23 to attend: https://theeuropeanchatbot.com/

Find out more about Kore.ai and book a demo here- Kore.ai request demo

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Maaike Coppens returns to VUX World for the third time and joins a small but prestigious group of two to get the VUX World hat trick. Maaike is an author, and the VP Design at OpenDialogue; a conversational AI startup changing the way we approach conversation design. In this conversation, we'll explore why we're a community with amnesia, overlooking some basic design principles such as user research. Maaike will share some tips on how to conduct user research and the value it brings to conversational AI projects.

Join VUX World at the EU Chatbot Summit where we’ll be hosting a full day of enterprise AI best practice content, with the likes of Vodafone, Love Holidays, LNER and many more. We have a 30% DISCOUNT for you too: VUXEU23 to attend: https://theeuropeanchatbot.com/

Find out more about OpenDialog: https://opendialog.ai

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ChatGPT and LLMs are reaching the peak of the hype cycle right now, but does that mean that it's all talk and no substance? On the contrary. Cognigy recently announced a flurry of features utilising Large Language Models in its platform with the aim of improving the AI creator and AI user experience. Cognigy CEO, Philipp Heltewig, and SVP of Business Development & Strategy, Hardy Myers, join me to share more insights into the future of conversational AI creation.

Visit https://www.cognigy.com/

Join VUX World at the EU Chatbot Summit where we’ll be hosting a full day of enterprise AI best practice content, with the likes of Vodafone, Love Holidays, LNER and many more. We have a 30% DISCOUNT for you too: VUXEU23 to attend: https://theeuropeanchatbot.com/

Find out more about Kore.ai and book a demo here- Kore.ai request demo

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