Talk to the bot: How conversational AI is changing the world

As we lean on technology to simplify our lives, so our use of AI, often in ways that are almost invisible, continues to increase. If you think about many of our day-to-day activities, from checking your favourite weather app, to what ads you see online; from speaking to your choice of digital assistant to getting information from your bank via WhatsApp, all of these are powered by AI. The ubiquity of AI underplays the complexity of the engineering that goes into these systems, explains Sebastian Reeve, Director of International Go-To-Market, Intelligent Engagement at Nuance Communications. "The AI that powers modern technology isn't something that simply emerged one day, it's the culmination of decades of work that began with the creation of speech recognition and natural language technologies. These technologies, many of them developed by Nuance, power the interactive voice response systems that you use each time you call into a contact centre and provide the foundation of today's smart digital assistants."