Conversation Design Festival: Making AI Speak Human

Get ready to get your hands dirty as we are back for our fourth edition of the Conversation Design Festival! This time you will be creating human-centric conversational AI Assistants. You won't be on your own, but working alongside professionals from our technology partners and CAI experts.

Don't miss this opportunity to work on relevant use cases with industry leaders at the Conversation Design Festival: Making AI Speak Human on Tuesday January 24th, 2023 beginning at 9:00 AM CET! 

Agenda: Making AI Speak Human

The Conversation Design Festival: Making AI Speak Human will be focused on hands-on workshops, giving attendees a wonderful opportunity to build their portfolio's and grow in the Conversational AI space. 

The full agenda for the event can be found below! 

What is the CDI Foundation?

The CDI Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing standards for the conversational AI community. CDI Foundation engages with industry stakeholders to create opportunities that will better allow people to enter the field of work, as well as establish alignment among those currently involved in these pursuits.

CD Festival 4th Edition 

Making AI Speak Human will be a 1-day global virtual event for individuals in the  Conversational AI community looking to expand their current portfolios — with real world examples, future developments and best practices.  

What to Expect at the CD Festival: 'Making AI Speak Human' 

Human-centricity and inclusivity shouldn’t be an afterthought. The creators of these conversational AI systems need to embrace this as guiding principles in everything they do. But how do you do it well? How do you make sure that AI systems understand what you say, and speak back to you in a way that makes you feel understood?

We need to understand how empathy and role-playing, are the key steps to creating AI Assistants that people actually want to talk to. That AI is not an engineering problem and that it’s actually crucial to bring creatives into the industry to make AI speak human.

The Festival will include: 

• Workshops & Hackathons
• Tips to advance your Conversational AI career
• Best Practices & Future Developments 
• Working on use cases together with Industry Experts
• Areas of opportunity in Conversational AI & how to execute 

Guests Include: 

• Microsoft 
• Salesforce
• Infobip
• HumanFirst
• Ultimate.ai
• RMIT Forward University

And more! 

Full Agenda to be announced! 

CDI Foundation Partners

Microsoft

Microsoft has a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Power Virtual Agents is Microsoft’s Conversational AI tool to empower everyone to easily create conversational bots, from professional developers, citizen developers to business users alike – seamlessly build secure and scalable virtual agents in a single bot building platform.

As a proud member of the CDI Foundation we both believe it's important to respond rapidly to your customer and employee needs—at scale—using intelligent conversational bots built with Power Virtual Agents.

RMIT Forward University 

RMIT University FORWARD, The Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation, part of the university's College of Vocational Education, is a proud member of the CDI Foundation. 

As an official member of the foundation RMIT FORWARD will be offering ten scholarships to study with FORWARD and the CDI Foundation! The scholarships which will be offered aim to inspire a diverse group of people to purse their dreams in Conversational AI. 

Learn more about the RMIT Scholarship Initiative.

HumanFirst

HumanFirst is a leader in creating tools for AI Trainers and NLU designers.

With HumanFirst, people discover intents from production data, label training data, manage hierarchies of intents & entities, evaluate models with k-fold/regression testing, and much more. 

As a member of the CDI Foundation HumanFirst will help develop industry standards for NLU design and AI Training, which will help shape educational programs at Conversation Design Institute.

Ultimate.ai

"Ultimate is not just automation software. It’s built from the ground up to deliver on both business and experience goals. We’re excited to work closely with Ultimate as they support CS teams to unlock the potential of conversational AI and deliver delightful human-centric experiences.”

- Hans van Dam

Ethics are one of the core values at Ultimate and as a member of the CDI Foundation they are dedicated to making every AI-powered conversation joyful and human-centric.

Infobip

Infobip is a global leader in omnichannel engagement powering a broad range of messaging channels, tools and solutions for advanced customer engagement, authentication and security.

Botpress is the leading open-source chatbot stack, allowing developers to build better chatbots without a team of data scientists and machine learning experts.

In supporting the CDI Foundation they believe in a human-centric workflow, in which a diverse team engages with the audience to ensure empathy and inclusivity. 

 

 

 

Open Voice Network

Open Voice Network (OVON) is developing the technical standards and usage guidelines that will voice technology worthy of user trust. 

The CDI Foundation works very close with OVON and Jon Stine Executive Director at Open Voice Network sits on the CDI Foundation advisory board assisting in tracking the adoption of the design standards, and update on important projects.

Salesforce

Diversity and Inclusion are the way of the future. Salesforce top value is Trust, closely followed by Customer Success. Many businesses swiftly responding to customer needs around representation and validation of historically underrepresented minorities in the business setting.

In their support of the CDI Foundation, Salesforce is committed to building trust in Conversational AI, so people will feel heard by the product, and thereby represented in the data on which the product is trained, and their inclusion and adoption of the experience helps drive customer success.

Voiceflow

Voiceflow, is the industry standard collaboration platform to design, prototype and build conversational assistants - across any channel.  

As a proud member of the CDI Foundation, they believe in a broad adoption of the human-centric workflow and standards that advance trust and communication between humans and AI at a global scale.

CrossPhase

Working with Crossphase means working based on sincerity, mutual trust and fun. With AI Assistants being an essential part of our future,  we should therefore take responsibility to advance trust and communication between people and AI.  

As a member of the CDI Foundation we've aligned on these values with Crossphase and both believe stories need to be told in the best possible way, but first need to lay the foundation of building trust between humans and artificial intelligence.

Dashbot

Dashbot is a conversational AI data platform that enables enterprises to understand their conversational data streams and accelerate innovation in automated conversational experiences. Leverage insights from your conversational data to monitor conversational AI performance,  prioritize new use cases and generate effective training data.

As a proud supporter of the CDI Foundation we will work together to create human-centric and inclusive conversational experiences at scale, with adopting design standards that embody these principles.

Rasa

Rasa is one of the leading Conversational AI Platform for building, improving, and scaling enterprise-grade text and voice-based AI Assistants. With specialties in natural language processing, dialogue management, NLP, NLU, AI, conversational AI, machine learning, bots, chatbots, assistants and more. 

In their support of the CDI Foundation we both plan to use proper standards allow universities to train students better, it then allow enterprises to hire and onboard people faster, and they assure technology companies that there is a large group of people qualified to put conversational products to good use.

Join the #1 Conversational AI Community! 

The Conversational AI community is rapidly growing and luckily we have created a space for all of us who share this passion to come together! 

Become a part of the world’s #1 Conversational AI Community to have access to all Festival recordings, both past & future.  Our first three festivals have a combined 60+ hours of engaging content from 50+ speakers! 

Take advantage of this incredible opportunity, and as an added bonus: get access to 2 free courses!

Interested in becoming an Official Supporter? 

Become a member of the CDI Foundation to sponsor any and all projects beginning with Making AI Speak Human! 

Creating Human-Centric AI Assistants with the CDI Foundation! 

Join us on Tuesday January 24th, 2023 for a day packed with hands-on learning featuring industry experts & our foundation partners. Take advantage of this amazing opportunity to expand your portfolio by participating in workshops & hackathons with your peers in the Conversational AI space.

The festival is a great resource to expand your personal knowledge surrounding Conversational AI, which in turn can help your team or enhance your personal project process. Don’t miss this great event where you will be collaborating with like minded individuals and the chance to learn more about all the news things our institute has planned for the community - sign up today! 

Get your tickets from Hopin now! 

Making AI Speak Human Agenda:

The Conversation Design Festival: Making AI Speak Human will begin promptly at 9.00 CET on Tuesday January 24th and at the conclusion of the event, you will have a firm understanding of how human-centric AI Assistants are the future and the importance of creating them. 

Throughout the event, companies will be hosting hands-on workshops so you can gain the necessary skills to add to your portfolio to become a greater Conversational AI professional. 

Explore the full agenda below! 

Creating a Diverse, Equitable and Inclusive Conversational AI Industry

9.00 - 10.30 CET

Peter Thomas, the Inaugural director of FORWARD The Centre for Future Skills and Workplace Transformation at RMIT University and Helen Babb-Delia a development partner at FORWARD and the founder & CEO of Yes Get it will be leading this workshop where you will explore these issues and provide an interactive learning experience for those who attend the workshop. Helen will first overview some key ideas and then participants will be asked to work with each other to identify some barriers and challenges in this area, and propose solutions and practical actions, that fit the unique characteristics of the growing conversational AI industry.

Chatbot Best Practices: How to Build Delightful  Conversational Flows

10.30 - 12.00 CET

Marika Sarén, Lead Automation Consultant at Ultimate is hosting this workshop where participants will use Ultimate’s in-house expertise and best practice, which has been developed after building, improving and refining thousands of support chat flows with customers, Marika will show you how best to design conversation flows that are both useful for your customers and feel human. 

Conversation Design for a Brazilian Electoral Chatbot on WhatsApp

12.00 - 13.30 CET

How to Launch and Supervise a Generative Chatbot using HumanFirst and OpenAI GPT

13.30 - 15.00 CET

HumanFirst will be joining the Conversation Design Festival for the first time, with Gregory Whiteside CEO, and Stephen Broadhurst Head of Customer Solutions leading the way.  In their session you will learn about their tool and the newly OpenAI GPT.  

Attendees will participate in a demonstration on how to launch these new styles of bots quickly in a controlled fashion: monitoring what your users are saying to it and supervising what it says back to users.  How you can lever these new technologies and strong NLU Design to better understand your user’s challenges and how to change your product features and bot training in response.

Microsoft and Conversation Design Institute Hackathon

15.00 - 18.00 CET

Get ready for our MAIN EVENT! 

Microsoft will be participating at the Conversation Design Festival for their second time holding a joint hackathon with Conversation Design Institute. 

Sarah Critchley Principal Program Manager and Gary Pretty Principal Product Manager at Microsoft will be joined by Jasper Klimbie, Creative Director at Conversation Design Institute Services as they will give expert support in your creation of a bot using Microsoft Power Virtual Agents.  In this session you will: 

• Put CDI Standards into practice
• Experiment with Microsoft's PVA Platform
• Engage & Collaborate with peers in Conversational AI

SPEAKING: Operationalizing Context in Conversational AI 

18.00 - 19.30 CET

Denise Martinez is returning to the Conversation Design Festival and will be leading an interactive workshop on the SPEAKING model – a conceptual framework where we turn abstract concepts in Conversational AI into something that can help us systematically gather language, culture, and context data. Don't miss the opportunity to learn how Salesforce is making their mark in the Conversational AI Industry.

How the American Red Cross Visualizes Conversational Journeys to Drive Positive Outcomes

19.30 - 21.00 CET

Unlock the potential of your conversational data and discover how to create experiences that drive positive outcomes. Join a panel discussion led by CDI CEO & Founder Hans van Dam to learn how the American Red Cross connected hurricane victims with local shelters and automated blood donation scheduling. Say goodbye to basing decisions on intuition and domain expertise. Don't miss this valuable conversation on the power of conversational data and its ability to reveal insights and opportunities for automation.

How conversation designers are using GPT/LLMs in Voiceflow to automate content generation and curate assistants

21.00 - 22.00 CET

Awards Show

22.00 

At the conclusion of the event we will be handing out special awards to attendees. Stay tuned for more details!