Layla El Asri on Dialogue Systems: Women in AI Podcast

One of the highlights of 2017 has to be the launch of our Podcast, Women in AI. We’ve spoken to leading female minds from Facebook, Sightline Innovation, McGill University, Imperial College and many more. On each episode we speak to CEOs, CTOs, Data Scientists, Engineers, Researchers and Industry Professionals to learn about their cutting edge work and advances, as well as their impact on AI and their place in the industry.

In our latest episode, we spoke with Layla El Asri from Maluuba, a Canadian AI company teaching machines to think, reason, and communicate with humans. On this episode we discussed her work leading a team to improve natural language understanding in these assistants.

However useful AI assistants are, they’re still not perfect. They’re designed to serve us through dialogue, but to be effective they must not only understand natural language, but be able to generate sentences that communicate back in a human-like manner.

Listen to the full episode of the podcast here.

In 2018, 60% of consumers expect voice-activated smart assistants to have a major or moderate impact on their daily lives by 2020, 20% of business content will come from AI by 2018, and 80% of customer relationship management will be done without human interaction by 2020 (SalesForce, 2017).

To learn more, join us at the AI Assistant Summit in San Francisco on January 25 & 26 to learn from experts in the field.