After the “Carnival of the Creators” everyone knew they were somewhere special. We had also reached peak attendance with lunch being provided. So the timing was perfect for the brain trust of our industry to present, that is the sponsors of TADSummit, in the: Sponsors’ Plenary – The Brain Trust of Our Industry.
Here Come the Bots, Adam Kalsey, Technical Marketing Manager Cisco / Tropo / CiscoSparkDev. Everywhere you turn, you hear about bots. After years of the point and click interface dominating computing, are bots just a return to the 1980s command line? Can’t we do better than Clippy? It’s time to change your perception of bots. We’ll talk about how natural language, machine learning, and advances in speech technology are driving the next generation of bots. See how you can use design techniques to create bots that fade into the background. See bots that are more than just text, and find out how telecommunications companies can participate in the bot gold rush.
Adam has a long history in bots, from his work on IMified many years ago. His funny and spot-on presentation clearly explains we’re at the beginning of this automation trend. Today, most bots are poorly designed towards customers’ problems. And the ways we interact with bots will be much greater than the simplistic voice or messaging experiences we know today. With for example whispers (only you hear) in conversations and multi-channel. That future is already here though with MVNO services (supported by Tropo) like RingPlus+, its just not evenly distributed.
Matrix: The future of communication is decentralised, secure and interoperable Matthew Hodgson, Technical Co-founder, Matrix.org. Over the last few years many messaging platforms have gained popularity. They offer the same basic functionality, and differentiate with better UIs/UX and the types and number of integrations and bots. However, they all have one thing in common: they don’t talk to each other. In the current situation, the biggest loser is the user. It means we have to create numerous accounts across all these silos so we can keep in touch with all our contacts and not miss out on their social interaction. And in doing so we give away our data to various centralised silos, completely losing control over it. But users are also the most important thing for apps – can we make use of this power and demand a future where apps can interoperate?
Instead of joining the app that’s currently where all your contacts hang out, you could instead choose the app that has the most integrations and thus be able to talk to everyone. This is the problem the Matrix team is trying to solve: Matrix (matrix.org) is an open standard for decentralised communication. Matrix can be used for decentralised group chat (with optional end-to-end encryption), WebRTC signaling, Internet of Things data transfer, and anywhere you need a common data fabric to link together fragmented silos of communication.
For me, the biggest development is the explosion of users (90k) and messages (70k per day). Its gaining traction across a number of use cases. Cooperation with IPFS and Project reThink is likely, see Stream 3 Decentralized Communications workshop, creating the core of the decentralized web. In 2017 we will use Matrix much more for communications at TADHack and TADSummit, I will just need to slowly ween myself off Slack <img src="http://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/72x72/1f609.png" alt="