Takeaways from 6th Int’l Chatbot Summit & Voice Summit Berlin 2019

The chat and voice are becoming inseparable. Moreso, we are on the verge of the implementation of the full ambient computing experiences. Google and Amazon are fully focused on this, each with own twist and approach to that. All pieces of the technology puzzle are now ready to create one holistic experience.

Here is the collection of our notes from the 6th International Conversational A.I.Conference & Expo (previously known as the Chatbot & Voice Summit).

• • About 1 billion people in the World can only use voice and are not able to text (eg. children, people with disabilities, elderlies, etc.).
  • It is key to remember that on every channel you should have a consistent message, aligned all across. As Nikola Aschoff, Head of Digital Extended Services at Mercedes-Benz put it:

    Content is King. Context is Queen. Consistency is God.

    Nikola Aschoff,

    Head of Digital Extended Services at Mercedes-Benz

  • Conversational experiences rely on reliable and accessible data. It is a challenge at large enterprises and the effort needed to transform existing content for a great conversational experience is very much underestimated.
  • Current challenge is in the multi language support as none of the voice and chat systems are able to fully offer that. Limited accents and dialects recognition at the moment limits mass adoption.
  • Hans Van Dam, the CEO and Co-founder of Robocopy have quite impressed us with the level of knowledge within the conversational design space. The guys have set the bar to create a world class certification program in conversational design, combining the knowledge of technology, psychology and conversational copywriting. Probably the only program to-date that is worth noting for anyone who is set to enter the Conversational Design space.
  • Businesses tend to start at the wrong angle of the conversational design implementation. They follow the old approach by thinking of technology first, then focus on knowledge management and then on business processes. Instead, just like with the Design Thinking / Service Design when it comes to software and services development, it all starts with the end user discovery following a human-centric approach. Build your user and bot personas first (eg. use bot canvas method by identifying what a human vs. bot expect).
  • A tip when it comes to dealing with rejection or aiming to achieve a positive answer: If a person says yes 3 times in a row, there is a high chance of getting a positive answer on the 4th question.

• Very important to build a trust relationship between a bot and a user. There are such markers in conversational AI:
  • Bot persona as an ethical framework
  • Designing for moments of stress and uncertainty
  • Verification
  • Explainability
• Make sure you design for modal autonomy
• Prompts and visuals should be aligned. The display prompts should be the condensed versions of spoken prompts.
• Multimodality – the future is about it. Meaning a connection of various data sources and technology.
• Thinking of application of voice started in the 90s. A lot of research and experimentation has been done since then.
• 54% would always choose a chatbot over a human customer service representative if it saves them 10 min.
• 59% of consumers felt that companies using chatbot lose the connection with end customers.
• 

Noteworthy discoveries around the exhibition area:

• Bold360 by LogMeIn with HQ in Boston. A quite friendly Customer Engagement solution with low code, no code bot making platform for easy experimentation with conversational chatbot cases. However, don’t have the Apple Business Chat (ABC) yet.
• CoCo by Ai Conversation System. A marketplace for conversational components for your bot.
• Botonic.io An open source bot framework developed by Hubtype. Allows to build Conversational Apps using React.
• BOTFriends A middleware service for Conversational applications. Supports different NLP platforms (Dialog Flow, LUIS) and allows migration from one to another.
• Watermelon A Bot platform from the Netherlands for customer support. Supports CRMs like Salesforce, Hubspot out of the box. Easy deployment to the web page using CXHub.
• Upseller – A Finnish Conversational commerce platform. Integrates seamlessly with your business backend systems. Price, availability or product information are always available for the bot.

Your happy tech explorers from Master of Code Global,

Ivan Pohrebniyak, Client Delivery Director
Gleb Dobzhanskiy, VP of Engineering