Autumn review of the Conversational User Interface

About time we got back on this horse, the AI and ChatBot market place has been very, very, noisy this year with some:

• Unbelievably dense marketing BS from corporate machines, balanced with inquisitive, playful and sometimes even pragmatic discussions from people like us in the Conversational User Interface market.

• Early squalls with respect to GDPR and privacy from Knowle West Media Centre as well as the EU.

• Mainly worthless development of transactional systems across social media platforms and underlying granular platforms trying to ring fence some business IP.

• Strong progression with machine and deep learning in some, but not all, use-cases - this countermanded by some academic hoo har about which, if any, algorithms are actually of value to conversation as natural language processing.

• Huge amounts of investment leading to (guesstimate) 500,000 data scientists applying AI to get us to ... just ... buy ... that ... damn ... thing ... will ... you in the main but with some higher aspirations too.

• Talk about higher education entirely missing the requirement to formally train people working in the AI and ChatBot conversational layer, meanwhile the commercial delivery targets crash their way forwards.

• Earlyish adopters of conversational home assistants kicking off the AI through consumer convenience phase of this market. Google is ( sorry I meant to say isn't ) listening all the time so they will/won't be able to tell us all how valid we are as digital humans in a few years ;-)

• Oh and a computer that beat a human at Go was beaten by another computer 100 times in a row after it taught itself Go by playing with itself.

Does any of this really matter to people who are building, selling, advising, worrying, living and/or loving the Conversational User Interface marketplace ?

The next meeting with be a fast paced affair where as many of these issues will be aired and context given for discussion.

With any luck one of our members will be able to give a view of machine learning from an earlier wave.

More details as we get closer to the event.

Happy Monday out there folks :-D ... nearly lunchtime.

Phil D Hall