VUX World

You might think of Google assistant as the thing that you use to search the web on your phone or the speaker you use to play music at home. But with every new partnership, Google adds another string to its assistant’s bow that sees a slightly different Google Assistant appear on different surfaces. All the while, the Google Assistant umbrella expands and it edges closer to becoming the default ass...

Davide Petramala, Director of Customer and Partner Onboarding, Avaya, joins us to share his take on improving your customer experience using conversational AI, and how you can do that using Avaya technology and approaches. We'll dive into the importance of customer experience and how the bar is constantly being raised, as well as what you can do to keep meeting rising customer expectations. We'll...

When you build voice assistants for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, most of the control over what the AI is doing and how its performing is lost. You can't access audio files, so you can't really understand what users actually said. You can't see anything about how the NLU classified an utterance, either. With Alexa, you don't even get the transcript of what the user said. All of this lack...

You know when you just  know  that you have a slide somewhere with the exact information you need on it, but you can't remember which deck it's in? When did you create it? Where did you store it? I myself have spent countless hours over the years searching for specific bits of information in slide decks, reports, word documents and more. Time wasted. Time that Lucy AI promises to give yo...

Microsoft has a range of AI services to help brands and individuals create seamless conversational experiences. From large scale enterprise assistants, such as the solutions in play at  Swisscom  and the  BBC , to small scale services too. With MS Build just around the corner, we get a sneak peak at what to expect from the Azure Bot Services team, as well as a rundown on just exactl...

In this episode, we speak to Laetitia Cailleteau, Managing Director | DATA & AI Europe Lead | Global Lead for Conversational AI at Accenture, about the origins of the patent, the problem it solves, the value of personalised voice experiences and more about what Accenture is up to in AI, and how its thinking about conversational AI's potential to transfer customer experience. Links Connect with...

We take it for granted that, when we talk to our voice assistants, they hear us. When we dictate a message to Siri, it transcribes it. Speech recognition is used in a whole manner of areas beyond voice assistants, too. Transcribing videos on YouTube, PowerPoint, dictation, call transcriptions in contact centres and beyond. But speech recognition systems don't always perform as expected and re...

Swisscom, Switzerland's largest telco, has one of the most widespread uses of conversational AI we've seen to date. With voice-enabled set-top-boxes, customer service-based chat and messaging applications, as well as a voice-enabled IVR system for call routing, Swisscom is all-in on voice and conversational AI. Roger Dill heads up the Dialogue Management, AI and ML product and has scaled...

Sam Danby of Boost.ai joins us to share how to take your conversational AI to the next level using Boost technology, including creating conversational agents from web content, assessing and choosing the right technology such as ASR and NLU, as well as learning and iterating on language models. Links Follow Sam on Twitter and connect on LinkedIn Visit Boost.ai Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy...

Marie Kleinert and Ray-Allen Taylor of VUI Agency join us to share some of the methodologies and practices they use to create charismatic voice assistants and how you can do the same. We dive into areas such as: Defining charisma from a voice assistant perspective TTS tuning and challenges The value of creating a persona The importance of linguistics in conversation design When and how to create c...

Google Cloud's Head of Conversational AI and Contact Center, Antony Passemard, joins us to dive under the hood of Google CCAI; Google's Contact Centre AI product. Antony manages the entire product suite and joins us to share what CCAI is, how it's being used to improve customer experience within contact centres across industries, as well as describing how you can use the tools yourself to streamli...

Voicebots for customer service are in increasing demand, but how do you actually integrate one into a contact centre? Learn how to take an existing chatbot and repurpose it for your contact centre. Many chatbots provide immense value to customers, and many call centres are overwhelmed with demand. Why not offer your chatbot service through your contact centre and help customers self serve, and cus...

As much as voice technology has been hyped over the last few years, perhaps leading to some unrealistic expectations, it's beginning to find its feet in reliably and consistently improving customer service in contact centres.  Regardless of hype, voice technology has super-human qualities when applied in a customer services environment and especially, according to today's guest Nikola Mrkšić,...

Tom Hewitson, Founder and CEO, Labworks.io, joins us to share how he built a business on Alexa and Google Assistant, how he finds, keeps hold and monetises users, design best practice and advice for those looking to do the same. In 2017 and 2018, when Amazon Alexa began rolling our in-skill purchasing (ISP), many thought that there'd be a gold rush on the Alexa platform.  Business will be bui...

Derek Roberti is the VP Technology, North America, at Cognigy, based in California. He joins us to share his insights and observations on using conversational AI automation in the enterprise for automating service delivery.  We chat to Derek about: Cognigy and its history Democratising AI The need for market education  The balance between technical capability and ease...

Nate Brown is the Chief Experience Officer at Officium Labs, world-leading CX consultancy. He joins us to share how a customer-centric culture shaped around customer feedback can create the conditions and insights needed to build products and services that customers love.  The exact same methodologies and practices can feed directly into your conversational automation strategy...

When it comes to making customer interactions with conversational AI more human-like, there's often one thing missing. Emotion. We chat to Nico Perony about how OTO.ai is being used to understand emotion and sentiment of users in order for businesses to create more compelling customer experiences. Married with conversational AI, bots can be more sensitive to the caller based on their emotional sta...

When I was on the  Voicebot podcast , Bret asked me whether we're going through a voice first winter. I said that I didn't think so, nor did I really care. There are opportunities to do good work and enhance people's lives regardless. However, there has been an undercurrent in pockets of the industry where some folks are becoming frustrated that voice hasn't reached its potential (however you...

Resemble.ai is a cutting edge synthetic voice (text-to-speech) provider that allows anyone or any brand to create their own, customer TTS solution to use across any and all channels. From IVR, Alexa and Google Assistant to narrating videos and marketing materials and even voicing game characters. With just 50 lines of speech, you could have your own dedicated brand voice that brings a consistent a...

Mihai Antonescu joins us to discuss the history of voice at Mercedes, the origins of the HeyMercedes voice assistant and the process for building it. You'll also learn tips and tricks that'll help you put together your approach to creating your own assistant, as well as how to understand and measure the business value voice assistants can bring. Mihai asked us before the show to challenge him with...

Justin Randall, Chief Innovation Officer at Comwave, one of Canada's largest independent telco companies, joins us to share his experiences of designing, building and implementing a Google DialogFlow agent in the contact centre. We'll cover the drivers for doing it, the process he followed, the things he learned and advice for doing the same. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 04:30 About Justin Randall and C...

With almost all call centres looking to us AI to automate an increasing number of conversations with customers, what does the future of customer service look like? And what's the future of work going to look like for your staff? What can you do today to prepare for an AI-first future, both from a customer experience and staffing perspective? Lots of big questions will need answering in 2021, and t...

Dan joins us to share his insights on the most important recent developments in voice AI technology and how it's enabling business transformation, as well as some of the emerging trends we're likely to see unfold in 2021. Voice AI is  disrupting all kinds of industries  and providing opportunities for almost every and any business unit. None, perhaps, has the potential to prosper more th...

One of the hot topics on every UX designer's lips is conversation design. How do you do it? Is it something I can do? And what skill sets do I currently have that put me in a good position? Stuart Silverstein, season UX and service designer, also has deep experience in designing conversational user interfaces, from messenger applications to voice bots and IVR assistants. Stuart joins us to walk th...

Voice commerce: the state of play We've been speaking about the potential of  voice first devices to change shopping behaviour  and drive sales and engagement for a while. I wrote about it in the  Harvard Business Review  over a year ago. Yet, we're not seeing a huge amount of use cases executed. So are people actually using their voice assistants to shop? And, if so, what can...