Own The Conversation - Issue #45

Own The Conversation is a weekly, manually curated newsletter with all the news in the world of Conversational AI.

Jul 17, 2022

Hello you! Yes, you. You, my outstanding subscriber. I must apologise for the lack of a newsletter last week. The platform I was using - Revue - had a significant outage, which turned out to be a DNS issue.

I couldn’t access anything - my previous issues, my subscriber list. Nothing.

So I have decided to migrate from Revue to Substack - after hearing so many great things about it. In all honesty, I’ve become so used to Revue that I am now sitting here like a chimp from the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, trying desperately to work out how it all works.

So, because of the platform move and the look and feel of Substack, this newsletter may have a slightly (read: completely) different layout.

So, without further ado, let’s move on to the Conversations to Own.

Conversational AI Jobs

Firstly, let’s talk about Conversational AI jobs. Obviously, I get to see a lot of trends and patterns by running Bot Jobs and I can tell you that job numbers are at approximately 50% of where they were at peak post-pandemic hiring. I suppose that this is in line with most tech companies (including FAANG/MANAMANA) reporting a slow-down in hiring as they navigate the economic uncertainty that war/recession/pandemic brings with it.

However, we are still seeing hiring. Check out these featured roles at The Schwarz Group (a leading international retailer with 500,000 employees worldwide in 33 different countries and over 12,900 stores).

See over 350 roles at Bot Jobs

👉 For 20% discount on job postings on Bot Jobs, use discount code OTC20OFF when posting featured jobs - available for all Own The Conversation subscribers 👈

Now, onto the interesting news, articles and content of the week.

Conversations To Own

This month saw the release of Gartner’s Assessment of Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms. Rather than linking to a report that needs Gartner membership, I thought I would point you in the direction of Cobus Greyling’s own thoughts and analysis of the assessment.

The Gartner report highlights 14 critical capabilities on which 21 Conversational AI frameworks were measured on. Spoiler alert - there are some surprise additions to the top frameworks and some surprising omissions/low scorers.

Next up, Facebook…. erm Meta. And a few news items that caught my eye this week.

Firstly, Meta’s ambitions to build a ‘universal translator’ continues with the creation of a single AI model capable of translating across 200 different languages, including many not supported by current commercial tools. The company is open-sourcing the project in the hopes that others will build on its work.

This, to me, is fast becoming the obvious killer-app for AR. We’ve already seen Google’s tease of its next generation Google Glass with live translate. And now it looks like Meta is jumping into this obvious area with this project.

Secondly, Meta and Ray-Bans’s Stories glasses are adding WhatsApp support, letting users make hands-free calls, send text messages, and hear messages read aloud. The addition follows the rollout of similar Facebook Messenger features last year, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says users will soon be able to directly reply to WhatsApp and Messenger messages with voice commands as well.

Meta Newsroom @MetaNewsroom

With @ray_ban Stories you can now make calls, send messages and hear messages read aloud via @WhatsApp hands-free ✋🤚 Learn more facebook.com/zuck/posts/pfb…

Anybody using these? I keep umming and ahhing about buying a pair of these ‘smart’ Ray-Bans, but I just can’t bring myself to hit the ‘checkout’ button.

Lastly, Meta is making a scene with Make-a-Scene. Make-a-Scene is Meta’s competitor to OpenAI’s DALL-E and Google’s Imagen, but takes the tech a step further with accepting rough sketches from the user to direct the AI.

Now, onto the other Conversational AI news items that have caught my eye this week:

Events to Attend: July - September

July

Conversational User Interfaces
July 26–28, 2022
Glasgow, UK

August

Ai4 2022
Aug 16–18
Las Vegas, NV

September

Conversational AI Summit
Sept 22–23, 2022
London, UK

AI Summit Silicon Valley
Sept 28–29
Santa Clara, CA

Voice of Healthcare
Sept 29, 2022
Boston, MA

Well, that’s it. The first in my new version of the weekly newsletter. I’d love to hear what you think about it? Do you prefer this format? Why/why not?

Let me know your thoughts, feedback and ideas of what you want to see by DM on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or even TikTok

Here’s hoping you have a great week. I’ll be hiding from the hottest temperatures that the UK has ever seen!

Martyn

Own The Conversation