The Humans of Talkabot
Announcing another set of speakers for Talkabot, the conference and community event devoted to bots
As we have planned Talkabot, one of the most remarkable things we’ve discovered is the incredible scope of what we mean when we say “bot.”
There are work bots that help people do their jobs. There are art bots that create poetry and generate amazing images that no human could create. There are brand bots that seek to help customers or spread marketing messages. There are consumer bots and enterprise bots. There are game bots, dating bots, shopping bots, and bots that pretend to be you on social media.
Some of these are new types of bots, and some have been in use since the dawn of the internet. There is an incredible wealth of information and experience in this broad community of designers, developers, marketers, entrepreneurs and tool makers. Our vision for Talkabot is to bring people from all of these disciplines and sub-genres together so that we can help and teach one another how to make great, successful applications.
I am so excited to announce our second round of speakers who will be joining us on stage in Austin on September 28 and 29th. These folks represent some of the most influential, experienced, and adventurous people in our industry!
All 10 new speakers are below, and the full list, which includes folks like the co-founders of the world’s first ever commercial bot, is on the event website.
Ted Livingston, CEO of Kik
Kik is one of the biggest platforms for consumer bots. Ted has been an outspoken proponent of bots for more than two years, and with a $50 million dollars in investment from the makers of WeChat, he is a clear authority on the market for and possibilities of consumer-facing bots. I am still shocked that we were able to get Ted to come spend time with us.
Alyx Baldwin & Rachel Law / Founders, Kip
Alyx and Rachel created the adorable and super useful shopping assistant, Kip. Kip enables groups of people to shop for things together inside Slack and Facebook Messenger. They’re joining us to show off the powerful and very clever way Kip uses emojis and stickers to improve the shopping experience.
Andy Mauro / Co-founder, Automat
Andy spent the last 15 years learning how voice can be used to communicate with computers, starting with early phone based speech recognition systems through to the first enterprise mobile virtual assistant. Do the same rules apply to applications for messaging? Some do and some don’t!
Christina Apatow / VP of Client Solutions, Api.ai
Natural language and voice processing are key components in the broader world of bots and messaging. At the heart of many bots building built today are the tools provided by api.ai. What can these tools do to make bots better?
Esther Crawford / Creator of Estherbot
You have probably heard of Esther, the creator of the Facebook bot Estherbot. Estherbot was supposed to find Esther a job, but ended up defining a new class of personal bots that share info and make appointments for their owners. She basically ripped an idea right out of the future and made it real for us. Thanks Esther.
Christian Brucculeri / CEO, Snaps
Snaps is a company that has built high profile marketing campaigns using messaging. Stickers. Emojis. GIFs. Christian will talk about how they’re adapting to a world of interactive bots, and the kind of thing experiences their big label clients are looking for.
Drew Magliozzi / Co-founder, AdmitHub
Drew’s company builds tools to improve the lives of students and help them apply to and succeed in college. They built a bot that answers questions about the college admissions process! The opportunities for bots in education are huge.
Amir Shevat / Director of Dev. Relations, Slack
Amir is the director of developer relations at Slack, and also a huge nerd about the Slack APIs and the capabilities of bots inside Slack. At the last event I saw him, he boldly did a live demo onstage of a self-programmable bot. Amir is going to give us deeper insight into how bots are performing inside Slack.
Don Goodman-Wilson / Senior Developer Advocate, Slack
We’re lucky enough to two people from Slack!! Don will be participating in the workshop day on Sept 27th. More information about the workshop and more awesome guest speakers will be forthcoming.
We are working hard to make Talkabot a great event. We want it to be interesting and productive and entertaining and exciting. I think that the speakers who will be joining us on stage in Austin represent some of the best people available to speak on this subject. If you care about or are working on bots or anything bot related, please come and join us!
We also have a killer venue for our opening night party.
Buy a Talkabot conference pass here. This is the last week to buy early bird tickets at a discounted price. There are also still passes available for the workshop day, but they are going fast!
Follow @TalkabotConf on Twitter for updates and announcements.
