SOUN...Ding out the hype: CAI and NLP 015

SOUN...Ding out the hype: CAI and NLP 015

It's that time of the week again, folks. Here's the rundown of all that matters in the field of conversational AI and NLP.

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Presented by Deepgram

Learn more about Deepgram here.

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SoundHound goes public

Feels like a long time coming, but SoundHound has finally gone public, completing its business combination with Archimedes, a special purpose acquisition company.

SoundHound now trades under SOUN on the NASDAQ

Read more

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HumanFirst interviews Cobus Greyling

HumanFirst managed to bag a rare interview with one of the NLP industry’s finest minds, Cobus Greyling.?

Cobus was leading the conversational AI charge at Vodafone, with his team building out Vodafone’s long-standing example of CAI done well, Toby.?

Cobus remarks on the trends he’s seeing in the CAI industry and where he thinks it’s going. Worth a read for the hardcore CAI fans.

Read it here

By the way, Cobus will join me live on the VUX World podcast on 24th May. Subscribe to VUX World to be notified.

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Replicant raises $78m

Conversational AI platform, Replicant, is the latest to raise funds.

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InWorld launches first preview of meta verse character builder?

From the creators of API.ai (better known as DialogFlow), InWorld is an interesting proposition: an avatar building platform specifically for metaverse applications.

Find out more

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Skoda's AI assistant Laura expands

Skoda continues roll out of AI assistant, ‘Laura’ powered by Teneo by Artificial Solutions and run by Cognizant.?

Read the press release

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A HUGE list of conversational AI research papers

Each one discussed at CHI 2022 conference. Shout out to Maaike Groenewege for putting this together.

Check out the list

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Top challenges faced by conversational AI practitioners in 2022

Brian Smith, Intuit, shares the top challenges faced by conversational AI practitioners in 2022.

Read it here

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Avaya and Microsoft partnership?

Avaya uses Microsoft plumbing in its Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, as well as having the ability to be hosted on the Azure Cloud and integrated with Teams.

Read the press release

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Forrester on the top conversational automation platforms for B2B

Forrester predicts that by 2030 80% of jobs will be transformed by automation as it reviews New Tech: Conversation Automation Technology for B2B Marketing and Sales.?

The report reviews 18 conversational automation platforms and does some high level analysis on their suitability for B2B sales.?

The challenge with studies like this, is that you can build an assistant for any use case using any conversational AI platform. Therefore, arriving at a shortlist of vendors that are good for B2B sales is pretty tough.?

Forrester states that it arrived at this list through speaking with its expert analysts and interviewing external subject matter experts. Though part of me wonders whether the platforms were actually looked at in any great detail.

QBox made the list, and it’s an analytics capability, not a conversational automation platform. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, but it just doesn’t seem to meet the criteria for this.

Others have historically weak conversational capabilities, like Drift and Intercom, the latter requiring an IBM Watson integration to have any real degree of NLU-based conversations. Whereas Drift has NLU capabilities, almost every deployment I’ve seen uses keywords and clickable options.

Read the full report

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Gartner releases Critical Capabilities for Conversational AI Platforms report

This report looks at 18 capabilities across 5 use cases, using the vendors listed in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms as the vendor list.?

While your specific requirements might differ, it’s actually a half decent place to start if you’re looking for a conversational AI platform for your business.

Read more

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Picking apart the AI hype from the reality

Emily Bender pens some real sense here, picking apart a recent NYT Magazine article on OpenAI to distinguish AI hype from reality.?

There’s so much in here that it’s hard to pick out the highlights. Emily is possibly one of the best analysts I’ve read, raising points in this article that I wouldn’t have even considered as hype, but in essence, it is.

Even using phrases that we kind of accept at face value, Emily considers part of the hype. For example, NLP systems having intelligence and performing learning, when really, it’s just an algorithm predicting the next word.?

So clever.?

Emily’s conclusion is interesting too, stating that we should really be focusing on the groundwork for this AI stuff to be built upon (ethics, governance and direction) rather than “playing around with fancy algorithms”.?

Read through the hype

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Will 5G enable new voice and CX capabilities?

“Interactive calling leverages 5G networks to offer advanced #voice calling functionality, including interactive content and screen sharing, directly in the native calling app on #smartphones, thus negating the need for third-party applications.”

Imagine making a phone call to your bank or insurance company, speaking to a voice assistant and being able to do things like screen share, document upload and utilise multimodal and visuals all directly from within the call interface.

We’ve been talking about the decline of apps for a while and now 5G capabilities enable interactive customer experiences utilising native operating system apps, such as the phone app on your iPhone or Android.

Companies like ujet.cx already enable these types of experiences from within mobile apps for brands, but this recent study from Juniper suggests that telco networks such as EE and T-Mobile might be able to utilise the same kind of infrastructure to bring this capability to native mobile operating systems.

Read more

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Meta is releasing a 175 billion word large language model for free

Read more

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Is the whole Web3 thing full of FOMO??

Is it the Alexa skills store all over again? Dale LaRue of RAIN takes a look in this VentureBeat piece.?

Read more

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From the podcast

Speaker, author and CX guru, Brad Cleveland, joined me last week to chat about 2022 customer experience trends.

Catch the conversation here.

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Learn how Marks and Spencer is using conversational AI in this interview with Contact Systems Lead, Steven Siddall.

Watch/listen here

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Learn how Homeserve is using DialogFlow in its call centre in this interview with Channel Automation Manager, Phil Jordan.

Catch up here

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Webinar replays

Check out the last VUX World webinar with Raj Koneru, CEO, Kore AI where we dived deep into the value of agent assist. Raj shared plenty of great insights on why most companies get agent assist wrong, and some solid principles for implementing agent assist in your contact centre.

Watch here

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Coming up

Join me next week on Tuesday to hear how AMRO Bank uses conversational AI in this live interview with Joroen Das, Product Owner, AMRO Bank.

Or tune in to this epic conversation on Wednesday about the need for privacy first AI, with Private AI CEO, Patricia Thaine.

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VUX World is the front door to the world of AI-powered customer experience, helping business leaders and teams understand why voice, conversational AI and NLP technologies are revolutionising how we live, work and get things done.

We help executives formulate the future of customer experience strategies and guide teams in designing, building and implementing revolutionary products and services built on emerging AI and NLP technologies.

Find out more about how VUX World can help your brand succeed with AI.

Bobby Bryant, M.Ed.

#Humanfirst | #Proptech | Real Estate Nerd | Building an AI-Powered Real Estate Marketplace | CEO/Founder of DOSS Group, INC. | Backed by AMAZON & GOOGLE | NUPE ????|

2 年

That's a win for all of us! #boom

Cobus Greyling

Language Models, AI Agents, Agentic Applications, Development Frameworks & Data-Centric Productivity Tools

2 年

First of all Kane Simms, thanks for making me laugh. Secondly, thanks for calling me a legend... Hopefully there will be more interviews soon... ??.

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