About 37%, or in numbers, 95 million U.S. adults have smart speakers in their homes. Half of them are daily active users. However, in the last two years, user growth has only been at 4%. (Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report Mach 2022) About 70% of surveyed businesses stated that voice-enabled digital assistant technology is critical […]
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Conversational Interaction Conference 2022
I did something last week I hadn’t done for quite some time: I spoke at a conference in front of a live audience. I started speaking at conferences in 2002 after I had created the SwiXml open source project: Graphical User Interfaces were described in XML documents, parsed at runtime, and rendered into Java objects – Android […]
Frictionless Speed / Zero Intent Skills
Teams had taken four runs down the 1,450 meter (almost 1 mile) long track, made of reinforced concrete, covered in ice. Still, their combined times were separated by less than a blink of an eye. The ice on the track varied, the colder and harder, the faster the sleds would go. A sled’s metal blades […]
Alicia vs Alexa
Democratizing the creation of delightful audible content Have you ever heard an interview with Alicia Keys? She spent most of her childhood in Hell’s Kitchen, one of New York City’s toughest neighborhoods. Experiencing how much emotion she’s putting into each word and her very deliberate expressive pronunciation means you cannot just casually listen but have to […]
A Universal Voice Browser
On September 25, Amazon released 80 new devices, some of which can be found here. Even for a company of its size, that is an impressive number and an even more impressive line-up. However, I think something much more profound happened a day earlier. On Tuesday, September 24, 2019, at 11:04 AM EDT, in a […]
How to get conversational UI right
Cross-Post from my article on VentureBeat.com With the rise of AI, voice, and more generally language-driven technologies — like chatbots, Siri, and Amazon Echo — conversational user interfaces (CUI) have a chance of becoming the next major technology platform after mobile. The field of conversational UI holds a lot of promise in terms of how […]
SpeechTEK 2017, Washington, District Of Columbia
— The Einstein Memorial – National Academy of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Ave NW, Washington, DC 20418 “New uses of speech technologies are changing the way people interact with companies, devices, and each other. Speech frees users from keyboards and tiny screens and enables valuable, effective interactions in a variety of contexts.” Clearly focused, SpeechTek 2017 was intended […]
The Path to the CUI is Heavily Mined and Booby-Trapped
Cross-Post from my article in Chatbots Magazine The concept of the Conversational User Interface (CUI) is not really new. Wolfgang Wahlster of the German Research Center for AI, DFKI, wrote 12 years ago in his paper on Conversational User Interfaces: “Conversational user interfaces allow various natural communication modes like speech, gestures and facial expressions for […]
AI World Conference
The AI World Conference and Expo took place from November 7th to 9th at the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco. DIGITAL ASSISTANTS AND BOTS William Meisel, Ph.D., president, TMA Associates, led a 1/2 day seminar and provided insights and analysis on how to determine, which applications are best used for Digital Assistants and Bots communicating […]
The Conversational User Interface is a Minefield
Cross-Post from my article on Medium The path to an acceptable Conversational User Interface is heavily mined and booby-trapped. Let’s not fall into the IVR trap, but create a humanized and personalized user experience. [IVR – Interactive voice response is a technology that allows a computer to interact with humans through the use of voice […]
Mobile Voice Conference 2016
The Applied Voice Input Output Society (AVIOS) and TMA Associates organize the annual Mobile Voice Conference, which this year took place at the Westin in San Jose, California on April 11 and 12. Recognizing that speech recognition, speech synthesis, as well as language interpretation has matured, the Mobile Voice Conference 2016 focused on Language User Interfaces and explored trends […]
Putting your Bot into Slack
It all began back in 1990, when Hugh Loebner initiated a contest, designed to implement the Turing Test. The Loebner Prize is an annual competition in artificial intelligence, where judges decide, which chatbot is the most human-like. The format of the competition is that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge […]
SpeechTEK 2015 – New York City
This year, the annual SpeechTEK conference focused heavily on Virtual Agents and Advances in Biometrics. The conference took place at last year’s venue, the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City, but more noteworthy, this was the conference’s twenties anniversary. So I thought it was only appropriate, to put my conference talk “Bridging the Gap between […]
Mobile Voice Conference 2015
The Applied Voice Input Output Society (AVIOS) and TMA Associates organize the annual Mobile Voice Conference, which this year took place at the Sainte Claire Hotel in San Jose, California on April 20 and 21. The Mobile Voice Conference examines the current state of speech recognition, speech synthesis, and natural language understanding technology, what it […]
Listen2014 Conference
Listen 2014 was a short one-day conference, focusing on “Voice Interfaces for the Internet of Things” organized by Wit.ai Inc, the company that provides a WebService, making it easy for developers to build applications and devices that you can talk to. The conference took place on November 6. 2014 at the unique Bluxome Winery in […]