Talkabot ATX: August ’17 Recap
Austin’s monthly bot meetup is now being streamed as it happens!
Thanks to community sponsor Jeff Israel at the Condé Nast Digital Innovation Center, we are happy to announce our meetups will now be streamed live on Zoom! This means that we can now archive good quality streams of our videos on our Youtube channel, and accept remote presentations!
For more information on the stream location when our events are live, follow us on Twitter or on our Meetup group.
August Presentations
August is a tough time of the year to stay cool in Austin, but our presenters this month had a wide variety of bot related topics to discuss. Let’s dive in!
Sam Johnson — Bad Jupiter
BadJupiter is a personal assistant bot that learns about the world through interactions with users. His main purpose in life is to help people discover, remember, and share insights about stuff that’s interesting and important to them. However, his skills-based architecture makes it possible to expand his services beyond just managing information.
IPSoft Austin — Amelia
Some of the team at IPSoft Austin introduced everyone to their virtual worker offering, Amelia. With a focus on the enterprise, IPSoft covered their process for how to approach each customer with their individual needs, building out a virtual worker so that it provides function and not just information, and how to improve the virtual worker over time.
Presenting from the IPSoft Austin team was: Derrick Steele (Cognitive Implementation Engineer), Tom Peres (Cognitive Technical Architect) and Patrick Marlow (Senior Manager, Solutions Architect).
Matt Buck — The History and Future of Speaking with Machines
Though ubiquitous voice interfaces like the Google Home and Amazon Alexa became available only recently, the history of humanity’s attempts to converse with machines goes back centuries. In this talk, community organizer Matt Buck from Voxable reviews the history of the effort to give machines voice: from the earliest attempts at mimicking the human vocal tract, to giving machines the ability to read our thoughts.
Announcing our September lineup!
- Ben Brown, Founder Howdy AI — What’s cool about Microsoft Teams:
Fresh off the release of official support of Microsoft Teams for Howdy’s Botkit open source bot framework, Ben provides a quick primer on what developers should be excited about in the newest workplace chat platform, and how you can use team-specific features to make truly unique, productivity expanding experiences for your Team’s based workplace.
- Obaid Ahmed, Developer at Botmock — Designing Chatbot Conversations using Botmock
In this talk we will look at some of the ways you can design good conversations for your chatbot. We will build a conversation from scratch for Facebook Messenger and talk about the key ways you can think about architecting your conversational interface.
- Chris Traganos, VP of Developer Experience at Message.io — A Developer's Guide to Enterprise Chat Platforms:
An inside look at Slack, Cisco Spark, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts Chat, and Atlassian (HipChat + Stride) from a developer’s point of view. Understand the common traits across their APIs, underlying differences between platforms, and where workplace chat is heading.
- Jayneil Dalal, Chatbot designer at AT&T — Building Beautiful Bots
With more than 100,000 chatbots built on the Facebook Messenger platform alone, industry experts are claiming bots as the next big frontier in tech. Beautiful bots delight us. In this hands-on talk, Jayneil will share his journey for designing chatbots for IA Summit and Big Design conferences to reduce the workload on the conference organizers.
Attendees will then learn basic design principles to make their bots beautiful with the help of live demos and interviews Jayneil conducted with award-winning chatbots like Howdy, Poncho, Growbot.
Thanks to our Sponsors!
Many thanks to our community partners and sponsors!
- Howdy — http://howdy.ai/
- Voxable — http://voxable.io/
- Message.io — https://message.io/
- Condé Nast — http://condenast.com/austin/
- Cisco Spark — https://ciscospark.com/
Get involved!
Talkabot is organized by Howdy, the team behind Botkit and Botkit Studio in Austin, Tx, the worldwide home of bots!
Any questions? Want to present at a future meetup? Interested in being a sponsor? Contact us at info@talkabot.ai.
We’d love to hear from you!
