Own The Conversation - Issue #47
Own The Conversation is a weekly, manually curated newsletter with all the news in the world of Conversational AI.
Well well well. After a mammoth 6-week break from this newsletter - while my kids were on their school summer holidays - we are back.
Honestly, it feels like this has been the longest six weeks. But I did miss celebrating the one-year anniversary of this newsletter. I cannot believe that I’ve been doing this for a year.
Without further ado, let’s move on to the juicy stuff!
Conversational AI Jobs
Firstly, let’s talk about Conversational AI jobs. Hiring is still happening at full pace, so make sure that you sign up for alerts at Bot Jobs and keep up to date with the latest roles in our space. Plus, be the first to know about some interesting developments coming soon to Bot Jobs.
Top of the list today is a fantastic conversation design role at an amazing organisation.
Followed very closely by several roles being advertised by our friends at Emotech Ltd:
👉 For a 50% discount on job postings on Bot Jobs, use discount code BOT50 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
Well, how do I cover all the interesting news, articles and posts from the last 6-weeks? Who knows! What I will do though is cover a few things that I think warrants newsletter time.
Firstly funding. I think we can all agree that the M&A activity in the Conversational AI industry has been anything but boring. It seems like every week there’s a new announcement of some sort. So here’s the summer highlights. Congrats to all involved.
I think you’ll agree that this isn’t too shabby for a, historically, quiet time of the year for funding announcements. That’s more than a quarter of a billion dollars in two months and there’s probably more out there that either I have missed or haven’t made it public.
And now for the interesting news articles, posts and content that has crossed my desk that I have kept going back to (granted I’ve been a bit lapse over the last several weeks).
It wouldn’t be my newsletter without me referencing HR and/or recruitment, so I wanted to share this article - Practical (and Scary) Implications of Speech Technology in HR - as a starter for 10.
Next, I want to point you in the direction of Jim Rowe-Bot’s ‘28 Chatbot and Conversational AI Creators You Should Follow On LinkedIn’. This is a fantastic, crowdsourced, list of some of the best people to follow for the best content in our industry. Hat-tip to Jim who also has a great new e-book released on ‘How to be a great Conversation Designer.’ Get your copy here.
And it wouldn’t be a week in our world without another large language model being released, which is (obviously) better than all the rest. This week, it’s Amazon’s turn as they announce a new language model that outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Google’s PaLM on various NLP benchmarks.
For anybody in the business of Contact Centre Transformation, here’s 12 statistics that could help you inform your next decisions.
Finally, a big congratulations to Cobus Greyling and the team at HumanFirst for coming together. Cobus, one of the (if not THE) leading voices in our world has just announced that he is joining HumanFirst as their first Chief Evangelist. Awesome role for a top person and a superb hire for a great company.
Events to Attend: September - December
September
NVIDIA GTC
Sept 19-22, 2022
Online
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
October
Voice Summit 2022
Oct 10–13, 2022
Arlington, VA
World AI Summit
Oct 12–13, 2022
Amsterdam, NL
November
Open Data Science Conference
Nov 1–3, 2022
San Francisco, CA
Voice of Money
Nov 9, 2022
New York, NY
December
AI Expo
Dec 1–2, 2022
London, UK
AI Summit New York
Dec 7–8
New York, NY
As you know, I’m currently seeing out garden leave from Heyday, after being caught up in the Hootsuite layoffs. Interestingly, the term ‘Garden Leave’ came to prominence through one of my all-time favourite BBC sitcoms - Yes, Minister.
Anyway, if you want to add anything into next-week’s newsletter (events, news, articles) then feel free to DM me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or even TikTok
Here’s hoping you have a great week. I’m hoping for a bit more sun after a week of continuous rain here in the UK.
Martyn