Hot Tech Trends (Series): Chatbots & AI

“Bots” rapidly become a buzzword. Anyone near the fledgling industry would probably have agreed this was true for some time now, as bots (http://venturebeat.com/category/bots/), artificial intelligence (AI), and conversational commerce combine to form a hurricane of hype. Shortly after that Facebook, Microsoft and other vendors opened their platforms to bots. It's about a time to take a look back at how bots have progressed since then and evaluate this new and exciting opportunity for entrepreneurs. Yet, many early experiments with bots & AI hit the wall. We will discuss why it happened and what are the possible ways forward.

Agenda

18:00 - 18:30 - Gathering & Networking

18:30 - 19:15 - Chatbot is not a product, it's a feature - Michael Vakulenko (https://www.meetup.com/tlv-startup-hub/members/4533522/), VisionMobile (https://www.visionmobile.com/)

The talk overviews main approaches in conversational user interface, main challenges and possible ways forward.

19:15 - 19:30 - Break

19:30 - 20:15 - Chatbots: The hype phase is over, what's next? - Ilya Kritzmer (https://www.meetup.com/tlv-startup-hub/members/185964833/), Say2eat (http://www.say2eat.com/)

20:15 - 21:00 - Networking

About the Speakers:

Michael Vakulenko (https://www.meetup.com/tlv-startup-hub/members/4533522/) is a Strategy Director at VisionMobile (https://www.visionmobile.com/), a UK-based analyst firm working with top companies in mobile and IoT. Michael is active in the chatbot space for 2 years, including authoring a report on chatbot developers.

Ilya Kritsmer (https://www.meetup.com/tlv-startup-hub/members/185964833/), co-founder and CTO of Say2eat (http://www.say2eat.com/), a start-up company developing food ordering chatbots. Prior to founding Say2eat Ilya worked for Checkpoint, Intel and Ravello where he developed enterprise class solutions for Fortune 500 companies like General Motors and J.P. Morgan. Ilya holds B.Sc EE degree from Technion.