Opus Research’s Intelligent Assistants Conference and Intelligent Authentication Conference are just around the corner — September 12-13 in San Francisco. This year we’ll be hosting the third iteration of the annual Intelligent Assistants Awards. The IA Awards set our conference apart from the others and offer a great opportunity to see how self-service technologies are used in the real world to drive business value.

As a judge for the IA Awards since their inception in 2014, I always look forward to both the judging process and the annual awards ceremony. It’s interesting and enlightening to take a close-up look at how companies have deployed their intelligent assistance solutions. When judging, we even roll up our sleeves and try out the intelligent assistants as if we were the end user.

Last year, in preparation for the 2015 awards, we saw significant innovations over the solutions we had judged in 2014. More companies were leveraging their virtual agents across multiple channels, instead of just on their corporate websites. Customers could engage with the self-service assistants on mobile devices and even from within Facebook. Intelligent assistants were also more likely to have the ability to escalate sessions to a live agent when needed.

We also saw an increase in the use of voice biometrics, allowing users an easy and secure method to authenticate into the self-service apps. More companies were using unique branding of their intelligent assistants, giving them faces and personalities that represented the brand and increased customer engagement.

With advancements in machine learning and better integration of knowledge sources, we saw improvements in the ability of intelligent assistants to return the best answer.

This year we’re looking forward to more innovations. Will we see intelligent assistants that are even better at understanding customer intent and returning the best answer? Will there be more assistants that offer voice input? What about bots? Are we going to see customer support-focused virtual agents that exist on messaging platforms?

If you want to see how the judging turns out, be sure to attend the upcoming Intelligent Assistants and Intelligent Authentication Conferences. The IA Awards are a fun and enlightening part of the program, but you’ll have a ton of other opportunities to learn from company case studies and industry experts. We hope to see you next month in San Francisco to join in the conversation!

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication, Articles