Own The Conversation - Issue #50
Own The Conversation is a weekly, manually curated newsletter with all the news in the world of Conversational AI.
Oh, hello there, dear readers
Yes, that’s right, I’m back after a few weeks of being rather waylaid on the newsletter front. There’s been some personal downtime and some mountaineering getting in the way for last couple of weekends.
That’s not an excuse, but it just goes to show that a finely tuned weekly schedule can become broken when there’s no room for other things coming up. So I’m going to have a rethink on how I create this newsletter, rather than relying on a 1.5 hour stint of sitting in a café while my daughter takes part in her various sporting activities on a Saturday morning.
Either way, glad to be back and I hope you get some value out of this week’s newsletter.
If you think it would be valuable to your network, please feel free to share.
And if you are coming here off the back of a social share, or stumbled across it accidentally and think it’s something you need to be subscribed to (why wouldn’t you!?!) then feel free to subscribe here:
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 in the next few weeks (hint: you’ll love it if you’re a freelancer, or hiring freelancers).
👉 Standard job postings are still free. But for a 50% discount on featured job postings on Bot Jobs, use discount code BOT50 when posting featured jobs - available for all Own The Conversation subscribers 👈
What have I been up to?
I thought it might be interesting to let you into a bit of a ‘behind the scenes’ of my week, from a conversational AI perspective.
Firstly, I’ve been working on the relaunch of pplbots - a dedicated (and first of its kind) agency dedicated to helping recruiters, talent acquisition teams and recruitment technology vendors get the most out of automating conversations in the recruitment process.
The recruitment industry, here in the UK, also had IHR (In House Recruiters) Live in London this week. I was honoured to host the innovation stage, where I invited 13 different tech companies to present on how they were innovating the recruitment process. No Conversational AI tech, though!
Next, I’ve been working with my Botrepreneur colleagues - Barend and Jim - to plan out our next exciting phase of online and face-to-face networking opportunities. Check out the website for exciting details of our upcoming Conversational AI networking events (hint: clear your diary for Amsterdam in December).
I also had the opportunity to record a podcast this week with a large recruitment business to discuss Conversational AI in the recruitment process. Look out for this being published soon.
I’ve also been getting more interested in digital people, so this week I have been playing around with Soul Machines and inworld.ai. Let me know if you’ve used it and what your thoughts are.
Basically, I’m trying to get over my major FOMO created by all the amazing content coming out of Voice22 last week. If you were there, feel free to get in touch, as I’d love somebody to write a guest newsletter on the event - all the learnings and content that may have been missed by a lot of the community.
I also had FOMO for missing out on one of the world’s largest HR and Recruitment conferences last week - UNLEASH. There’s usually a good number of conversational technologies on display there and I would have loved to have been in Paris as well this week, for that.
Now, onto the interesting news, articles, and content of the week.
Conversations To Own
Well, this week has been a big week in the world of product announcements and events.
As I mentioned above, Voice22 was the main Conversational AI community event recently.
But, we also saw Facebook (errr Meta) and their Connect 2022 event. Obviously, the big news was the release of the $1500 Meta Quest Pro and loads of upcoming VR games (cannot wait for Iron Man VR), but I was exceptionally interested in all the news coming our way from the developments with the Presence Platform, including improvements to the Voice SDK. And we all know that voice and Conversational AI will drive adoption of the Metaverse.
Now, we also know that there was a little announcement that Meta and Microsoft have partnered up to bring Microsoft products to Meta’s (erm) Metaverse. This is a big deal!
This also (tenuously) links me nicely to the announcements from Microsoft’s Ignite 2022, which might be interesting for the CAI community.
There were numerous updates to Azure cognitive services announced, including Azure Cognitive Service for Speech adding new features to its speech-to-text and text-to-speech services (including new languages and emotions added to Neural Text to Speech to improve and scale the reach of voice assistants).
There’s so much going on right now, that it’s hard to keep up!
Events to Attend: November - March(!)
November
Botrepreneurs Online Networking
Nov 2, 2022
Online (50% Discount Code: 5EUR-NOV2-BOTJOBS)
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
Botrepreneurs (IRL) Beer & Bots
Dec 8, 2022
Amsterdam, Netherlands
AI Summit New York
Dec 7–8
New York, NY
January
Voice at CES
Jan 6, 2023
Las Vegas, NV
Botrepreneurs Online Networking
Jan 11, 2023
Online
Data Innovation Summit APAC
Jan 12, 2023
Singapore
February
Enterprise AI Summit
Feb 8–9, 2023
Amsterdam, NL
World AI Cannes Festival
Feb 9–11, 2023
Cannes, FR
AI & Machine Learning in the Enterprise
Feb 21–22, 2023
Austin, TX
March
European Chatbot & Conversational AI Summit
Mar 15–16, 2023
Edinburgh, Scotland
Enterprise Connect
March 27–30, 2023
Orlando, FL
Autumn/Fall has well and truly arrived here in the UK. The leaves are falling, the rain is constant and the darker mornings/evenings are here. However, that also means time for pumpkin-spices latés and getting the kids’ outfits ready for Halloween.
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.
Martyn