Age of Conversations

The age of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning has brought about incredible progress in fields such as natural language understanding, speech recognition, image recognition and translation. Ironically, what these new, revolutionary improvements empower us to engage in is one of the ​oldest​ human behaviors – a conversation.

Technology is at its most profound when it is easy and intuitive to use and conversations are the most popular natural interface in the world – no matter how old we are, where we were born or how educated we are, we all know how to talk with one another. And this is why conversations matter. As we grow to 5B+ (mobile) internet users by 2020, they are an opportunity to act as a true equalizer of technology.
For product managers, the shift to conversational UI is a rare opportunity to charge into a new and unknown territory. With it comes a huge challenge as well – chasing NLU technologies that are not quite ready yet while helping users imagine what natural conversations with machines will look like when the technology catches up.

In this talk, I’d like to discuss:
● Former technological paradigm shifts that got us to this current revolution.
● The current state of natural language understanding and the conversational UI it
enables.
● Some of the innovative work around NLU and context modeling that is done by my
team at Google (+ live examples).
● Why these developments and challenges matters to everyone in technology.
● The lessons for product managers from working on nascent, technology-driven
products .