Tag Archive for: Chatbot Summit

A Buzz About Chatbots at G-Summit Melbourne

By Patrick Gallagher, Managing Director ANZ & North Asia

There was a definite buzz at this year’s G-Summit Melbourne, hosted by Genesys earlier this month, around the event theme: Together – Together, we can deliver iconic customer experiences by powering digital business with a human touch. The event was busy this year with a very strong turnout and plenty of interest in chatbots.

I had the pleasure of being on-hand in the AppFoundry Hub to represent Creative Virtual, an event sponsor and founding member of the Genesys AppFoundry, and show our chatbot and virtual agent solutions in action. V-Person™ technology enables organisations to provide customers with smart online help and is designed to be integrated with the Genesys platform to provide a seamless experience.

G-Summit MelbourneThe theme of this year’s event really resonated with us at Creative Virtual. Our mission is to help organisations provide seamless, end-to-end customer engagement by combining the digital channels with a human touch. Based on a set of customisable rules and triggers, our self-service virtual agents can seamlessly escalate users from virtual to real agent, with a complete history of their conversation being passed to the live agent. Live agents can pick up the conversation where the virtual agent left off without the customer needing to repeat the question or issue.

We also know that ‘pure’ AI solutions being promoted in the marketplace as virtual agents are not ready to be deployed for a support and service experience for customers. Virtual agents should employ self-learning capabilities, and deliver benefits from this, but in a way that gives companies control over the reliability of the responses. Our virtual agents and chatbots use a combination self-learning and human input to provide consistent and reliable information to customers and allow organisations to be absolutely sure that their solution is responding to users in a predictable way.

My thanks to Genesys for hosting another great G-Summit event and to everyone who visited us in the AppFoundry Hub to see our solutions in action. It was a pleasure to be a part of the event buzz and catch up with many friends from Genesys and Interactive Intelligence – now all one family!

Want to learn more? Request your own personalised chatbot demo to see our solutions in action.

“Keeping it real with chatbots” – Impressions from the Chatbot Summit

By Björn Gülsdorff, Head of Business Development

“Your talk was the most down to earth”, an attendee wrote me via the event’s messaging app after I had delivered my keynote “A Hybrid Approach to Machine Learning” at the Chatbot Summit in Berlin.

Now, is that good or bad for a keynote? Shouldn’t I have been breath-taking or ground-breaking or both – instead of down to earth?

Gaging by the talks we had later at our booth, it was a compliment. Creators of chatbots, as well as potential buyers, were happy to see a way out of the current AI craze where unsupervised machine learning seems to be the one and only solution and the power of the human brain is overlooked – and which requires enormous amounts of groomed, relevant data.

Enterprise ChatbotsIn fact, the chatbot community struggles to add learning, conversation and personalisation to their systems, which are very often highly scripted things. I spoke to a chatbot builder who was forced to use algorithms to create training data. Puts a new spin on the “artificial” in Artificial Intelligence.

There was also a lot of uncertainty about how to move chatbots into the enterprise world. A world of timelines, budget, ROI and predictability. Again, what it takes is a robust, proven, down to earth approach to each project, combining the virtual (artificial) intelligence with the real and unlocking existing silos of information. Not everyone from the chatbot crowd was happy to hear that though.

Nonetheless, it was a fantastic, energising event! I was pleased to join this buzzing chatbot community (we had our first discussions with other attendees while setting up our booth; it wasn’t even 8am!) and to learn that the number of bots is currently growing faster than the number of apps grew when the age of the apps began (and it is in decline again already). It is even fair to say I was touched to see a technology lift off that Creative Virtual has fostered and helped grow for over a decade – in fact, some of our senior management team started this in the last millennium.

Calling All Chatbot Enthusiasts to Berlin!

By Mandy Reed, Marketing Manager (Global)

Chatbots will take centre stage – along with the Development & AI Stage and the Product & UX Stage! – in Berlin next week at the Chatbot Summit. In its second year, the summit will bring together industry experts, established vendors, new start-ups and chatbot enthusiasts for a day of keynote presentations, panel discussions and networking opportunities on Monday, 26 June 2017.

Creative Virtual is pleased to be a sponsor of this year’s summit and to have Björn Gülsdorff, our Head of Business Development, joining the list of esteemed event speakers. Björn’s keynote presentation, Enterprise Chatbots: Taking a Hybrid Approach to Machine Learning, is scheduled for the afternoon on the Development & AI Stage. He’ll explore why pure AI and chatbots touted as wholly self-learning and self-maintaining aren’t a good fit for providing predictable, consistent and reliable customer service.

The Creative Virtual team will also be manning booth #13 where attendees can see live demos of our innovative chatbot solutions and get a look behind the scenes at the science of conversation. As an established and trusted vendor in this space, our chatbots are answering over 50 million questions every year for enterprises around the world – and that number is constantly growing! In April, Creative Virtual was awarded The Queen’s Awards for Enterprise: Innovation 2017 which was a win for the chatbot and virtual agent industry as well as our company. In order to receive the award, we had to prove not only that we’ve developed innovative technologies, but that Creative Virtual is achieving outstanding commercial success because of it. The Queen’s Awards recognition brings attention to chatbot technology and the positive results forward-thinking organisations are already achieving with our solutions.

In the early days of the technology, chatbots and virtual agents were standalone self-service tools that could answer only very basic questions and were often viewed as a novelty rather than a way to improve the customer experience or cut customer support costs. Today, they are tried-and-tested tools for providing digital self-service with greatly improved conversational abilities, options for integration across customer contact channels and proven results for reducing costs and improving customer experience. The Chatbot Summit – an event focused solely on this technology and its applications – highlights this exciting evolution and the growing awareness of chatbots.

Interested in joining us in Berlin for the Chatbot Summit? Purchase your tickets now using code cvbot20 and receive a 20% discount.

Not able to attend or want to do a little preparation before the summit? Download our educational whitepaper Virtual Agents and Chatbot and Avatars – confusing or what! to learn more about the role of chatbots in digital customer engagement.