With Opus Research’s Intelligent Assistants and Intelligent Authentication Conferences (IASquared) just days away, we’re gearing up for some great presentations and panel discussions. There’s unbounded excitement these day around intelligent assistance, conversational user interfaces, chatbots and voice assistants and that energy is spilling over into our conference.

Here’s a preview of just two of the panels that I’m looking forward to moderating.

Peeling Back the Onion on the Bot Craze

The first panel, scheduled for Monday afternoon, is called “What’s Your Bot Strategy?” We have a great cross-section of participants for this panel: Tobias Goebel of Aspect Software, Matt Schlicht of Chatbots Magazine and the Bots Facebook Group, and Brian Shivler of True Image.

Our goal for this panel is to drill into the crazy new world of chatbots that live on messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Kik, to name just a few. What’s all the excitement about? How do bots built to run on messaging platforms differ from the customer self-service intelligent assistants that live on corporate webpages and mobile apps? As an enterprise and/or brand, is it time to dive in and start putting bots out there on Facebook and other bot platforms for my customers to engage with?

This promises to be a super lively discussion. Each of the panelists has been in the thick of the bot craze and I can’t wait to hear their opinions and insights on what brands need to consider when entering the world of messaging-based bots.

Making the Most of User Interface Innovations

Another panel I’m moderating is called “Redefining the User Interface (UI).” This panel takes place on Day 2 of the conference and includes Brian Garr of Cognitive Code, Mark Stephen Meadows of Botanic, Joe Gagnon of Aspect Software, and Christian Petersen of Comcast.

Conversational user interfaces are the talk of the town. But CUIs aren’t the only innovation shaking the world of user interfaces when it comes to intelligent assistance. In this panel, we’ll explore some of the latest trends and new capabilities when it comes to UI design.

How can we leverage these new developments to up our games when it comes to customer self-service? What do the panelists see as great UI innovations on the horizon that we should start preparing for now? And what about investments we’ve already made in IVRs and voice infrastructure? Can we build on those “legacy” UI investments as we try to tap into all the goodness offered by new technologies?

I hope you’ll join me in discussing these exciting topics next week in San Francisco. If you haven’t registered for the conference yet, it’s not too late. See you next week and be sure to bring along your questions and ideas!

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication