Tag Archive for: podcast

A Look Back: 2022 in Review

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

As the end of 2022 draws near, it is time once again for Creative Virtual’s annual year in review blog post. Every year we take this opportunity to reflect on the hard work of our team, our contributions to the conversational AI industry, and a few of our company’s biggest highlights from the past 12 months.

Two of the things we are proudest of at Creative Virtual are our experienced, dedicated team and the unique expertise we provide to our customers and partners. Whether it’s through our product development or our collaborations with individual clients, it’s important to us that we consistently deliver the best solutions possible. Having an analyst group recognise us for this is always an exciting bonus – and that’s what happened again this year.

AIxOutlook conducted an independent assessment of the major conversational AI vendors in the market and found Creative Virtual to be the Innovation Excellence Leader!

“Creative Virtual is the clear Innovation Excellence Leader in a crowded and competitive conversational AI industry. Businesses collaborating with them benefit from their expert consultation, resulting in customised, integrated, and personalised solutions that deliver real business value.”

This Innovation Excellence Leadership award recognises us as the foremost conversational AI innovator driving the industry forward. You can read more about AIxOutlook’s full evaluation by downloading the report for free here. This honour means even more as we prepare for the upcoming launch of the next innovative release of our V-Person™ technology.

The analysts at Celent conducted their own evaluation of intelligent virtual assistant platforms as well, focusing in on the technology within the retail banking space. Creative Virtual was one of ten vendors included, and we are proud of our ‘Luminary’ ranking in the final report. This means we excelled in all three of the dimensions evaluated: Advanced Technology, Breadth of Functionality, and Customer Base and Support. Celent clients can access the full report here.

We were also awarded ‘Best Conversational AI Solutions’ in the SME News 2022 IT Awards. These awards recognise companies driving for innovation and focusing on client-centricity while also remaining true experts in their industry. Being recognised as the best in conversational AI made our Founder & CEO, Chris Ezekiel, contemplate what makes a virtual agent or chatbot a true conversational AI solution and share his insights in a blog post.

women leaders of conversational AIIn October I was recognised for my contribution to the conversational AI industry by being included in the Women Leaders of Conversational AI, Class of 2023! I’m honoured to have been selected to be a part of this inaugural class and am looking forward to attending the ceremony at the Project Voice Women’s Summit in April. The This Week in Voice podcast host, Bradley Metrock, dedicated an episode to introducing each of the women selected – you can listen anywhere you get your podcasts or check it out on YouTube here.

Age UK, a Creative Virtual customer since 2017, collaborated with us on a new case study exploring the four main goals they are achieving with our V-Person technology: improve discoverability of a large amount of online content; give people more ways to easily interact with and find information; resolve easy-to-answer queries online to reduce Advice Line calls; and be proactive in testing new innovations to better meet the charity’s objectives. Check out the full Age UK success story here.

In May we announced a new partnership with Service Management Group (SMG) to deliver an industry-first dynamic assistance capability. Dynamic assistance integrates V-Person conversational AI with SMG’s digital experience solution to deliver real-time support to users as they encounter issues during their online purchasing journey. Learn more about the partnership and dynamic assistance here.

2022 ALGIM conferenceWe joined our partner Enghouse Interactive in Christchurch, NZ in November for the ALGIM (Association of Local Government Information Management) 2022 Conference. Creative Virtual’s Patrick Gallagher co-presented a well-attended session on creating award-winning chatbots in local government.

Also in November, Mugdha Desai, our Head of India Operations, took part in the Agile Mumbai 2022 Conference. The event theme was ‘Artificial Intelligence for Business Agility’, and Mugdha was a featured panellist for the session titled, ‘Benefits of AI for End User’.

Founder & CEO, Chris shared his conversational AI insights through a variety of articles, podcasts, and interviews this year, including:

The Creative Virtual team continued our tradition of sharing our expertise through our annual Blog Post Celebration for Customer Service Week and CX Day in October. This year’s posts covered multi-lingual digital customer service, the members on a conversational AI team, the battle between humans and technology, and setting customer service projects up for success. You can find the whole 2022 collection here.

We aim to publish interesting and educational posts on our blog throughout the year. This year I’m proud to have two of my blog posts selected as finalists in the 2022 Customer Experience Update MVP Awards: Composable CX: Becoming Agile and Flexible in the CX Strategy category and Can Conversational AI Make Your CX More Human and Empathetic? in the CX Technology category. Voting for the MVPs – most valuable posts! – has ended, and the winners will be announced later this month.

One of the industries in which the Creative Virtual team has extensive experience is the Insurance sector. We collaborated with Insurance Thought Leadership (ITL) to produce a whitepaper exploring how conversational AI is enabling insurance companies to greatly improve their customer experience while also slashing costs. You can get your own copy of ‘The Virtual Insurance Agent’ whitepaper here.

We also put together a short, animated video to explain V-Person for Insurance, our conversational AI solution designed specifically for the insurance industry:

Another area in which we have extensive experience is improving existing chatbot and virtual agent implementations.  We published an eBook – Conversational AI Issues & Solutions: Transforming Ineffective Chatbot & Virtual Agent Projects – that explores six of the most common reasons business leaders have given for being unhappy with their conversational AI projects and ways to overcome those challenges.

2022 has been a busy and productive year for us at Creative Virtual and, as the year comes to an end, we are excitedly looking forward to 2023. We hope you’ll stay connected by subscribing to our Blog on this page and signing up here for our Monthly Newsletter.

This Week in Voice: Conversational AI use cases, ethical oversight, & Darth Vader

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

As someone who enjoys listening to interesting podcasts, I was excited at my recent invitation to be a guest on This Week in Voice. Now in its seventh season, this podcast is hosted by Bradley Metrock, CEO of Project Voice and covers some of the hottest conversational AI news stories of the week.

I joined the podcast’s panel of experts for Season 7, Episode 3 which was released on 29 September 2022. Bradley led us in a discussion of these four news stories:

Listen to the full episode below (or on YouTube here or wherever you get your podcasts) for my discussion with Bradley, Timo Kunz, and Sean McIlrath. Here are a few thoughts that stuck out for me from our conversation.

In the timeline of human history, voice-first applications like Siri and Alexa are very recent developments. I can’t help but wonder how they will impact the way we interact in the future as younger generations grow up not experiencing a time when they didn’t exist. It will be important as parents, and a society, to consciously balance the use of these technologies with human interactions, like making sure our children are still going to playgroup and engaging with their peers in person.

However, there are great use cases for this type of technology that can benefit our lives, such as alleviating loneliness and helping people find the help or information they need to deal with sensitive situations. They can also better our day-to-day lives with seemingly little things like checking the local weather or setting a timer when our hands are messy while cooking dinner. Yet not all the newest features being added by companies reflect use cases that are likely to become commonly used.

When it comes to discussing the ethical oversight of conversational AI, it’s important to first start with identifying the way it is being implemented. There are still lots of varying ideas around what ‘conversational AI’ is, and without a consensus you can’t identify an overarching ethical code. For example, Creative Virtual’s conversational AI technology uses a hybrid approach to AI in which there is no black box. Having this human-in-the-loop approach takes away many of the ethical concerns of a machine learning-only conversational AI solution.

I’m personally excited that James Earl Jones will continue to be the voice of Darth Vader through the power of AI, but not at all surprised by the capabilities of this technology. Creative Virtual was delivering this type of solution with a specialised voice partner 15-20 years ago for some of our avatars. This story does bring up the ethical oversight question again, though. It would be interesting to get a look at the contract to understand the specifics of how Jones’ voice can be used for the character.

Thanks again to Bradley, Timo, and Sean for the great discussion! Check out the full This Week in Voice episode:

 

Strong Leadership, Company Culture and Luck: A podcast alongside Sir Geoff Hurst

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

When I was approached by the Leaders Council of Great Britain and Northern Ireland about doing a podcast on leadership alongside one of my heroes, Sir Geoff Hurst, to say I was over the moon is an understatement! I’m an avid West Ham supporter and so I was VERY humbled to be on a podcast alongside the West Ham and England legend!

Being recognised as a successful leader is a great testament to the whole Creative Virtual team and the market leadership position we have attained. Receiving honours such as Frost & Sullivan’s AI-Enhanced Customer Self-Service Solutions Product Leadership Award and the Queen’s Awards for Enterprise: Innovation don’t just happen by accident. I couldn’t be more proud of Team Creative Virtual!

There’s lots of clichés of what makes a successful leader. Single-mindedness, hard work, teamwork, passion, vision and being able to steer the company through choppy waters are all essential qualities of course. And it also makes me think of the great leaders that have inspired me over the years, in particular Booby Moore (another West Ham and England legend who led by example), Sir Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher (political legends who led with conviction and epitomised single-mindedness) and Steve Jobs (whose passion and intuition helped create the world’s most successful technology company).

Some less obvious attributes that are very important to me include: keeping fit (healthy body, healthy mind and all that!) gives me the energy to work hard; running gives me the space and time to contemplate, which is particularly important when there’s a big decision to be made (which is quite often so it’s good that I run frequently!).

Creating an open and caring culture where people watch out for each other has always been extremely important to me. That stems from my working-class East End upbringing! J During the podcast interview, I talk about how Creative Virtual’s company culture is an important factor in our growth and success. We spend most of our lives at work, so it’s also crucial to remember to have some fun!

I think it’s important to recognise that luck (or fate) play an important part, which is why it’s essential to keep it real. And, having a love of physics, I believe there’s no better way to do this than to keep in mind the words of the late Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

A big thank you to the podcast host Matthew O’Neill, and everyone at the Leaders Council of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for giving me this wonderful opportunity! You can listen to the full podcast episode on YouTube and Spotify.