Own The Conversation - Issue #31
Martyn Redstone
Welcome to Own The Conversation!
Own The Conversation is a weekly, manually curated newsletter with all the news in the world of Conversational AI.
From interesting articles to funding news and the latest jobs. I hope you get everything you need, and more, from this newsletter.
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Martyn @ bot-jobs.com
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Conversations To Own
Articles and news that might interest you.
The new service, Google Cloud Contact Center AI Platform, is an expansion of its Google CCAI suite.
Google has complemented contact centers in several ways and is now expanding with its own end-to-end CCaaS offering called Contact Center AI Platform.
www-cxtoday-com.cdn.ampproject.org
The Rise and Stall of the U.S. Smart Speaker Market - New Report
Smart speakers powered by Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri represented a white-hot consumer device market in the 2016-2019 period. Surging sales were accompanied by a deluge of popular culture appearances. However, high double-digit growth rates were replaced by low single digit growth the past two years.
Former singer’s car accident leads to AI speech startup
A former singer has raised £300,000 in pre-seed funding for her speech recognition startup. Dia Thanki’s Alchemy Machines transcribes, analyses and summarises legal-specific web meetings and phone calls.
Continuous Speech Recognition Testing by Florian Treml
Continuous speech recognition testing has most benefits for voice assistants using an optimized cloud speech service or completely self-trained language models. As part of a voice assistant test strategy, the quality of the speech recognition should be verified continuously, as all the other stack components. This article will show how to set up a continuous speech recognition test suite.
Amazon Alexa can now help you understand your health symptoms with a series of prompts and suggestions.
Unity’s impressive new ‘Enemies’ short shows off a remarkably realistic digital human
Unity has released a tech demo that demonstrates what its game engine is capable of. ‘Enemies’ is a 2-minute long video that shows a detailed room and an almost realistic human being, all rendered by the popular game development engine. It shows how Unity can compete with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. The video is available in the article.
Conversational AI in E-Commerce Boosts Sales and ROI: A Case Study
They New York, a modern, luxury design and manufacturing footwear brand saw in-store sales booming. When They New York went online, the customer conversion rate dramatically dropped. In their efforts to overcome this challenge, They New York turned to an on-site AI-powered sales assistant, Rep.
Putting an end to ubiquitous chatbot’s ‘spiral of misery’
Several wayward linguistic volleys later, you give up in despair. That experience is so common that customer service experts have a name for it: “the spiral of misery.”
How To Boost Brand Awareness With Voice-First Technology
Advertisers and marketers have a massive opportunity to capitalize on the growth of voice-first tech with digital voice campaigns and sonic-focused promotions to boost brand awareness, writes Matt Muldoon, president, North America, ReadSpeaker.
5 conversational AI startups transforming customer engagement
Owing to the pandemic, the inability to have one-on-one conversations with customers led businesses to adapt artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-based customer engagement platforms for seamless customer experience. Players across industries are increasingly using smart bots to transform customer engagement.
How Search Fits Into Conversational Marketing
Through channels like online chat or even text messaging, brands have made massive strides to scale their outreach and engagement methods with prospects, making it feellike that store rep who is “just trying to help.”
Growing Conversational Commerce s Impact
Chris Higgins shares four actionable ideas that can help scale up conversational commerce in 2022
Funding and Deals
Woebot Health Raises $9.5M in Funding - FinSMEs
Woebot Health, a San Francisco, CA-based mental health company, raised an additional $9.5m in funding
Level AI Raises $20 Million in Funding
Level AI closed a $20 million Series B financing round, led by Neeraj Agrawal at Battery Ventures, who also led the company’s Series A round. Previous investors ENIAC and Village Global also participated. The latest funding represents a four-fold increase in valuation from the company’s Series A, which closed just six months ago. To date, the company has raised $35 million.
Sanctuary Cognitive Systems Closes US$58.5M Series A Funding
Sanctuary Cognitive Systems, a Vancouver, BC-based company focused on creating human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots, raised US$58.5M in Series A funding.
Latest Jobs from Bot Jobs
See more jobs at Bot Jobs.
FEATURED ROLE: NLP Specialist @ EBO ltd
You will be mainly responsible of transforming natural language data into training models using NLP techniques. You would need to be able to provide stats on training model performance and suggest ways of improving. To succeed in this role, you should possess outstanding skills in statistical analysis, machine learning methods and text representation techniques.
FEATURED ROLE: Conversation Design Specialist @ EBO ltd
We’re looking for a Conversation Design specialist who is a true digital native, passionate on the way we communicate and connect together. A talented wordsmith with a strong understanding of user experience, the ability to understand and capture the business needs of each customer and the flair to design exception conversational flows that meet our clients’ business objectives.
EVENTS & IRL MEETUPS
Online Networking Events About Conversational AI & Chatbots! Walk around in the virtual conference room and meet inspiring people!
Chatbots, AI & VOICE Conference 2022 @Metaverse
Join us in the Metaverse and network with the top industry experts from companies like Google, Amazon, Walmart.
Advantest VOICE – Advantest Developer Conference
Each year, the VOICE Developer Conference unites semiconductor test professionals representing the world’s leading integrated device manufacturers (IDMs), foundries, fabless semiconductor companies and outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) providers to exchange information about the latest technology advancements, express new ideas, share best practices and network with one another.
4th World Chatbots Summit | Luxatia International
Join us and global executives as we return for our 4th Annual World Chatbots Summit in Berlin, Germany on May 19th and 20th. This edition will focus on expanding the range of chatbot’s internal and external use cases, adding a human touch into NLP technology and overcoming ethical and security issues.
Conversational AI Summit | RE•WORK
Discover advances in NLP, and how application can help create digital assistants, chatbots and conversational interfaces to improve customer experience & increase engagement
PEVoC14 Conference will take place live on 24-27 August 2022
The 14th Pan-European Voice Conference has been postponed and will take place on 24-27 August 2022 in Tallinn, Estonia. The conference will take place in the new building of the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre.
Closing notes
Well, I returned from Budapest relatively unharmed (save for my wallet and my liver), only to find that after almost 2-years to the date of our first UK lockdown, COVID has entered the Redstone household. My daughter tested positive and, strangely, none of the rest of us seems to have caught it from her. She’s now negative as we have continued to be. Hoping that it stays that way before our family holiday in a few weeks.
I’m hoping that this newsletter keeps building and improving with every issue. Let me know your thoughts, feedback and ideas of what you want to see by DM on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or even TikTok (not that I have worked that one out yet!).
Martyn, Founder @ bot-jobs.com
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