Speech Technology eWeekly - July 04, 2018

Q & A

Q&A: Jane Price on Creating a Persona for your IVA

So you've decided you need an Intelligent Virtual Assistant. Your competitors have one, and your customers expect to be able to communicate with you this way. But an IVA is an extension of your brand that deserves as much thought as any other platform. Speech Technology Magazine recently asked Jane Price, SVP of Marketing, Interactions, about the ins-and-outs of constructing an IVA and giving it personality through a persona.

Q&A: Kevin Bobowski on AI and Voice Search in Marketing

When BrightEdge issued its "2018 Future of Marketing and AI Survey" AI and voice search emerged as topics weighing on the minds of marketers. Speech Technology had the chance to ask Kevin Bobowski, SVP of Marketing with BrightEdge, about the report's findings, and what they mean.

Speech Technology News

Convergys to be Acquired by SYNNEX Corporation

Convergys Corporation, a global provider in customer experience outsourcing, announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement under which SYNNEX Corporation.

Amazon Introduces Show Mode for Fire Tablets and the New Show Mode Charging Dock

Amazon announced Show Mode: a new, immersive hands-free Alexa experience for Fire HD 8 and Fire HD 10 tablets that provides full-screen visuals that complement voice responses from Alexa.

Tact.ai Raises $27 Million Series C

Tact.ai, a conversational AI sales platform, announced the completion of its $27 million Series C fundraiser, bringing the company's total funding to more than $57 million.

AISpeech Raises a $75M Series D

AISpeech, a China-based artificial intelligence startup, announced a $76 million Series D, boosting its total funding to over $121 million.

Amazon Updates Alexa App for iOS to Enable Voice Commands

iOS users with an Amazon Echo device will be relieved to know Amazon has updated it Alexa app for iOS to finally allow users to give voice commands to the smart assistant—which is kind of the point of having an Echo in the first place.

Industry Voices

Video: How Do You Build Engaging Contact Center Experiences?

AWS Head of Product, Language Tech Vikram Anzabhagan outlines 4 essential strategies for leveraging technology to make contact center interactions more personal, conversational, agile, and engaging in this clip from his SpeechTEK 2018 keynote.

Video: How Hardware Advances Have Transformed NLP

O'Reilly Media's Paco Nathan discusses the explosive growth in CPUs and GPUs that have opened new vistas for natural-language processing applications and rendered old approaches obsolete in this clip from his SpeechTEK 2018 keynote.

Four Ways Conversational Interfaces Could Simplify Your Life

On the last day of SpeechTEK 2018, I had the pleasure of moderating a Sunrise Session entitled "The Future of Speech-Enabled Applications." The goal of this roundtable was to brainstorm about creative and useful applications that could take conversational interactions to the next level. More than a dozen attendees from a variety of backgrounds held a lively discussion and came up with four innovative ideas, which I have summarized.

Video: What Can NLP Do for Your Converted Text?

Paco Nathan of O'Reilly Media's R & D Group discusses the benefits of natural-language processing (NLP) when working with text converted from video in this clip from his SpeechTEK 2018 keynote.

Chatting with the Rest of the World: Designing Multilingual Chatbots

Even though experienced Voice User Interface (VUI) designers are hyper-sensitive to the importance of good localization over blind translation—and to the challenges of conversational automation in general—our UI team was surprised at the number of complex roadblocks we ran into when localizing a chatbot for our large international client. Read on to find out what you need to consider before undertaking a similar project.

Video: How to Improve UX and User Rating for Your Alexa Skill

Witlingo Product Manager Navya Nayaki Yelloji discusses the successful product development and QA strategy Witlingo created for its Motley Fool Alexa Skill in this presentation from SpeechTEK 2018.

Videos: What's Your Favorite Use of Speech Technology?

We caught up with industry-insiders Michael McTear, Allyson Boudousquie, Debra Cancro, and Crispin Reedy at SpeechTEK 2018 and asked them what their favorite use of speech technology was this year. Find out what they said in the video that follows.