Creating an excellent voice experience is a key component, but it's not sufficient. In addition to covering content and conversation design, our experts will share what it takes to drive marketing and discovery for Alexa and Google Assistant.

Additionally, a clear process for deciding on your intents and entities will be shared to help you make skills that easily understand the user and are maintainable.

Event Schedule (EST Time Zone):

5:20 PM Getting settled and Zoom joining
5:25 PM Welcome back and kickoff!
5:30 PM Ilarna Nche, Alexa Champion & Founder & Software Engineer, Adassa
5:55 PM Deborah Dahl, Principal, Conversational Technologies
6:20 PM Final Q&A and Wrap-up

Presentation Summaries:

Talk 1 - Ilarna Nche, Alexa Champion & Founder & Software Engineer, Adassa

Creating an excellent voice experience is a key component, but it's not sufficient. In addition to covering content and conversation design, Ilarna will share what it takes to drive marketing and discovery for Alexa and Google Assistant.

Talk 2 - Deborah Dahl, Principal, Conversational Technologies

Today's virtual assistant platforms, such as Amazon Alexa, Google DialogFlow and Microsoft LUIS, offer highly capable and easy to use development tools. Yet the success of any application critically depends on the upfront design process that happens even before developers start using the tools. We have to answer such questions as the users' motivations for using the application in the first place (intents) and the information that the application needs from the users for the system to address these goals (entities). This information will feed directly into the development process. At a high level, this design process is independent of specific development platforms, but each platform has limitations that have to be taken into account in the design process. This talk will review strategies for designing the intents and entities needed for scalable and maintainable applications. It will also discuss accommodating designs to the limitations of popular platforms.

Speaker Bios:

Ilarna Nche

Ilarna is an award winning Alexa Champion and Bixby Premier Developer from Adassa Innovations. She has a huge portfolio of voice applications across Alexa, Google and Bixby and is an expert and thought leader in the voice & conversation design field, from both a development and design perspective.

Deborah Dahl

Deborah Dahl is Principal of Conversational Technologies, which assists its clients in creating state of the art solutions using speech, natural language, and dialog technologies. Her focus is on implementations of practical and scalable conversational systems that push the boundary between theory and applications. Her clients range in size from startups to large enterprises and government organizations. She has written many technical papers as well as three books, including Multimodal Interaction with W3C Standards: Toward Natural Interfaces to Everything, published in 2016.