Next week Opus Research hosts the Intelligent Assistants and Intelligent Authentication Conference (#IA-Squared) in London, England. With an agenda packed full of exciting panels, customer case studies, and networking sessions, we’re looking forward to a fantastic event.

The conference coincides with release of the much-anticipated update to Opus Research’s Intelligent Assistance Landscape, which we’ve published in partnership with Venture Beat. Dan Miller, Opus Founder and Lead Analyst, provided great insights on the newly released Intelligent Assistance Landscape in an earlier post, so be sure to check out his observations.

The Intelligent Assistants space is red hot and has recently become crowded with personal assistants, personal advisors, customer-facing enterprise virtual agents, chatbots, and just plain bots. In the midst of this frenzy, our IA landscape defines core technology services that support all aspects of Intelligent Assistance and creates a deliberate taxonomy of intelligent assistant categories.

All topics related to intelligent assistance and intelligent authentication are fair game for our London event. To give you just a small sampling of the rich content that we’ll cover next week, here’s a preview of some of our panels.

Talking Control of Our Digital Lives
This panel features Wally Brill of myWave and Ilya Gelfenbeyn of api.ai. Consumers and end users across a broad spectrum of services expect digital options when interacting with brands. In this panel we’ll discuss some of the technologies that power these digital self-service options. We’ll also talk about key challenges of offering conversational UIs and orchestrating services across the varied “botscape.” We may even get into discussions of the recent “botsplosion” and what that could mean for both users and developers. And will there be one bot, or one IVA, to rule them all?

Striking the “People vs. Machines” Balance
Machine Learning algorithms are becoming increasingly powerful. With large amounts of data from social media and other data sources, these algorithms are also being trained to identify and understand us better and to predict our needs. This discussion includes Peter Behrend of Creative Virtual, Mikhail Naumov of DigitalGenius, and Bob Sullebarger of Interactions LLC. How do we combine automated intelligent assistance with humans and with existing call center technologies? What tensions occur, in both the technology and in human support personnel, when we seek to combine artificial and human intelligence? What are companies asking for and are there common barriers to successfully implementing intelligent technologies?

How Artificial Intelligence Supports Intelligent Assistance
Featuring Sam Boyle of Inbenta and Mark Hanson of Nuance Communications, this panel looks at the integration of AI into intelligent assistance. We’ll talk about how intelligent assistants are trained and what technologies and processes they can leverage to learn new information over time. We’ll also talk about challenges in getting intelligent assistants to understand new domains and add expertise to their knowledge repertoire. Are customer expectations for artificial intelligence realistic? What are some obstacles to leveraging artificial intelligence effectively and how can they be overcome?

This preview covers only a fraction of a day and a half conference. We hope you can join us in London for lively, thoughtful discussions on some of today’s hottest topics in customer care, user interface design, and artificial intelligence.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication

Tags: Opus Research, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, Intelligent Assistance