Taking Turns

What's in a sales chatbot? Is it the a great conversational experience by automation, or maybe a live chat agent waiting in the dark to save the day? And, wait - why not both? Eric Kades, Founder at TextChat by JetSense.ai, believes in combining those two - and gives several examples of how conversational interfaces can resurrect a campaign, improve conversion rate substantially, and even help students avoid dropping from college.

2020 was a tough year, but at least at digital marketing and transformation, it was the Year of the Chatbot. And while we look, most of the time, to the USA or Europe as the center of the universe, the South African market is awakening as well - which is a great reason to have Nick Thomson from GotBot on the line. So why is chatbots so easy to sell nowadays? What happens when a chatbot you've created is TOO successful? And why should a good chatbot be "super sassy"? Watch Nick's fascinating conversation with our host, Eran Soroka.

How can a human-like chatbot help a country connect better with its citizens during a pandemic? How can a digital person become your business' brand ambassador? And how did Zara Jillings, a national basketball star and NCAA starting PG, pivot to conversational AI? Watch this episode of Taking Turns, and as a bonus, get an unexpected answer to one of the hottest discussions of the last two seasons: Kawhi or LeBron?

The Coronavirus brought the world to a halt - including the physical experience of shopping... and that's where and when chatbots came to save the day.   Maciej Maliszewski is the head of bots in K2bots.ai in Poland, where they help all kinds of businesses and institutes - from Ikea to the Warsaw University and deep into the fashion market. In the latest Taking Turns episodes, Maciej is talking about the gains businesses can get from going conversational, even in areas where the fit - pun intended - feels strange.

Lauren Golembiewski and her partner, developer and musician Matthew Buck, just loved to play at home with voice interactions and automation devices. When the industry started to evolve, they both quitted their jobs and founded Voxable, which helps companies - and individuals - create voice skills the right way.  So, how can you learn an instrument with a voice bot? How hard was it to create a voice skill for SXSW? And why is a user research so crucial?

How are being a teacher and being a conversation designer similar? How can e-learning benefit from conversational AI? And how can Alexa help you prepare a Thanksgiving turkey? In the 12th episode of Taking Turns, Eran Soroka catches up with one of the biggest and experienced experts in the field - Rebecca Evanhoe. Enjoy the show!

How can the implementation of conversational AI in the gaming industry create a better experience for the gamer - and a new world of opportunities for gaming companies? Why is the inability to have a free-flowing conversation with a character "sticks like a sore thumb"? In Episode 11 of Taking Turns,  especially for the Conversation Quest Meetup, Eran Soroka caught up with game development and design expert Nir Meidan.

How can you convince your stakeholders to explore a new route and change their perception? How a meetup with Japanese audience made him a voice expert? And what's the important thing that companies missing in the Coronavirus era? Emiel Langeberg, voice conversation design lead for Dutch fintech company Kandoor, talks all of it and more in the latest episode of Taking Turns, hosted by Eran Soroka.

Thorben Stemann wasn't supposed to build and oversee a chatbot - but a customer's request turned him into a chatbot developer. On the latest episode of Taking Turns, the former project manager talks about the importance of language and translations, how chatbot became an advantage for his company, and how relationship between users and his bot took a strange turn.

Conversation design was the perfect place from Maaike Coppens; Already being a UX and languague enthusiast, she fould a way to combine her two favourite fields into one. In our latest episode of Taking Turns, Coppens joins us to emphasize the importance of good UX, inclusion, and especially words - sometimes an afterthought, but always a potential for making the user angry or frustrated. How do you do it the right way? That's why Maaike is here. Enjoy the show!

Hillary Black hailed from social media, branding and copywriting, and joined the chatbot movement early - to become an expert in the field. Now, she can tell that those two worlds look similar to her in some aspect; recall a funny story about her days in Vine and Twitter; and explain why here current two-way texting robot at Mav is "a combination of like all of the best things that I've ever done".

"I could feel a breakup is coming, although I couldn't see his face, I couldn't hear his voice".  All of us suffer an eventual heartbreak; but instead of hanging his head down, Greg Bennett became intrigued with the place where it happened -  the textual chat. Now, as a conversation design lead for Salesforce, he made the best out of it - dissecting the message to its tiniest components: commas, emojies, periods, pauses. This interview is a deep, fascinating dive into the amazing world of linguistics. We hope you'll enjoy it like we did.

What's an improv comedy - a wild, vibrant, full of laughter event, and a chatbot - a planned, mechanical process, have in common? If you ask Kent Morita from Soul Machines, the answer is simple: a lot. Morita joins us for a great episode of Taking Turns, to talk about the importance of humor in a bot, the importance of face expressions, and an how an awkward anecdote led him to actually have more confidence in his workplace.

How being a live chat agent at a bank can make somebody ready for being a conversation designer? And how home beer brewing can make you the next conversation designer? We talked it over with Henry Ginsburg, who's running Michelle, the chatbot for University of the People - which helps people from all over the world get an American accredited, tuition-free degree, completely online.

When talking about creativity in fighting the Coronavirus pandemic, Chatbots are a great way of reaching and teaching a lot of people in a short time. Michelle Parayil works at Haptik.ai, a company that its Corona chatbot became the Indian government's official tool and chatted with 25 million people only in its first month. In this episode of Taking Turns, Michelle join us to share her experience - and talk about how one bad copy can ruin a customer's day.

Mary Tomasso's story is, in a way, the story of the remote working online industry. She started working online at 2009, by creating content and helping hundreds of people getting their business into the virtual space; then, when conversational AI entered the field, she became a leader in it, too. In the 2nd episode of our new web series, Taking Turns, Mary shares her experience, and also gives a compliment that made us blush.

After working in the intersection of human and computer's communication for about 20 years, Dr. Michelle Zhou - CEO and founder of Juji.io - knows a lot about how to make this connection as natural as possible. At our new show, Taking Turns - A conversation designed for conversation designers - Zhou joined us to tell about her expertise, share some tips - and explain what happens when a chatbot has a brain freeze.