CONVERSATIONAL INTERACTION CONFERENCE
Wolf Paulus
Assistant Professor of Computer Science @ Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University | AIML, Web Applications
With the Smartphone, the Speech Recognition and Synthesis industry had found a new playground. Exactly eight months before?Alexa?saw the light of day, from March 3rd-5th, 2014, at the Hyatt Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, the speech technology industry met for the fourth annual Mobile Voice Conference.
While in 2017, the conference was renamed?“Conversational Interaction”,?Bill Meisel‘s purpose for this gathering never changed:
Educating the speech community, developers and designers of speech applications, researchers, students, industry suppliers, companies using speech technology in their business, and individuals for whom the technology is of critical importance.
Mobile Voice 2014: Thomas Schalk introducing Marsal Gavalda and William Meisel
In 2014?Robert Weideman?(GM and Executive VP at Nuance) provided the keynote address and talked about personalizing customer service via a human-like conversational interface.
2014 was also the year when I started to participate more actively: I spoke about?Emotional Prosody?and suggested that SSML, the Speech Synthesis Markup Language, could be used to make synthesized speech sound happy, angry, or sad. I had developed a simple prosody and intonation editor that ran on top of?LumenVox‘s fantastic speech synthesis server and played this demo:
Fast forward six years, on Tuesday, February 11, 2020, my talk was scheduled to be the last at the Conversational Interaction Conference 2020. Flying into Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport, I had already seen travelers wearing face masks. Covid-19 was now on everyone’s mind, and I didn’t expect much of an audience, but to the contrary, even the last talk was packed. Titled?“Always empathic, but never biased”, I showed possibilities of a likable and unbiased engagement using affective computing technologies and emotion analytics. It also touched on a controversial topic: genderless bots and an approach that detected bias before a bot could relay it to its users.
Since then, I gave a few virtual talks and participated in some podcasts, but traveling to the Conversational Interaction Conference 2020 was my last business trip.
Fast forward two years, to today, Tuesday, April 5, 2022. A couple of months ago I had submitted a talk proposal for?#CIcon2022. During the last couple of weeks, I had finalized and published the?Sky Scope Alexa Skill,?which merely serves the purpose of showing the misery of the current Skill development process. I have also finalized and polished the slides and shot a short demo video. Today, on Tuesday, April 5, 2022, we are only one week away from the IN PERSON 2022?Conversational Interaction Conference. Bill Meisel pulled it off – and I’m so very much looking forward to participating .. one more time:?“Onwards to Conversational Applications.”
What if backend services responded differently?