As the size of our computing devices has shrunk significantly, to the point they have become wearable or ubiquitous in our cars and homes, the time has come to move beyond text and embrace speech. In this session, we’ll go from the current state of the industry to the challenges we need to overcome to take Conversational User Interface (CUI) out of the university lab and make it broadly available on a global scale. Looking at different aspects of a solid multilingual CUI, end-to-end, from ASR to TTS (all multilingual of course, and with an attitude and sense of humor – after all, we’re taking Natural Language here), including dialog management, we’ll engage the audience and challenge the industry to really think in terms of what we need to do collaboratively and collectively to build the next generation of CUI on a broad multilingual scale. TAUS has helped speed up the adoption of MT by building a community of users and through TDA (TAUS Data Association), maybe a similar collaborative approach could be used to speed up the development and deployment of global and affordable speech-based solutions. We have an opportunity to not only make it easier for every one of us to communicate with the devices that surround us, but also redefine literacy by enabling the next billion Internet users to access and consume information in a spoken form… Are we going to bridge the digital divide, or are we going to widen the existing gap? The jury is still out in my opinion, will you join us to influence the outcome? Session host: Loïc Dufresne de Virel (Intel Corporation) Presenters and panelists are Alexandros Poulis (Lionbridge), Gabriel Amores (Intel Corporation), Peter Cahill (Voysis), Siegfried "Jimmy" Kunzmann (EML)

1. TAUS Industry Leaders Summit, Dublin, June 2016
Alexandros Poulis – Lionbridge
Gabriel Amores – Intel
Peter Cahill - Voysis
Jimmy Kunzmann - EML
Loïc Dufresne de Virel – Intel

2. Information Technology
• Alexandros Poulis, Business Manager for Cognitive Systems – Lionbridge
• Gabriel Amores, Principal Engineer - Intel
• Peter Cahill, Founder - Voysis
• Siegfried “Jimmy” Kunzmann, Manager, R&D – European Media Laboratory
Can you each say a few words about your background and area(s) of expertise?
Your Panelists for This Session

3. Information Technology
• Where are we at, industry-wide, in terms of multilingual solutions?
• Can you give us a brief panorama of the state of the art in your area of
expertise?
• Considering only one language, when do you think we’ll have an end-to-end
solution allowing anyone speaking English to interact naturally via voice with
their “device”?
ASR, NLU, DM, TTS…

4. Information Technology
• A few experts in NLP and AI claim that
we’re entering the age of the digital
assistant, with “personas” like Cortana,
Alexa, Siri, or Watson, devices like Echo or
Jibo, and bots of all kinds… What is your
take on that?
• Are Alexa, Cortana, and Siri becoming the
voices, and to a point, the “ambassadors” of
Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple? If so, how
can we give them a little bit of attitude and
some empathy?
The Age of the Digital Assistant, with an Attitude

5. Information Technology
• To take “speech-enabled devices” from the labs to
the street and every remote corner on the planet,
in a global and multilingual way, do you think we
need partnerships between Private Companies
(aka the “Industry”), Universities, NGOs, and
Governments?
• How should such partnerships evolve over time?
• Is Open Source in this area a blessing or a curse?
• Is the Industry putting the ability of Universities to
conduct non-commercial research at risk by hiring
away huge numbers of students and professors?
The Need for Collaboration

6. Information Technology
• How far are we from a truly Universal
Translator?
• What’s missing to make a Universal
Translator a reality?
• Are there any really hard challenges to
tackle?
• What aspects of your work are heavily
language-dependent?
• Do we need more data to train our
statistical systems?
From Yesterday’s Sci-Fi to Today’s Reality

7. Information Technology
Bridging the Digital Divide
• Do you think the recent advances in speech technology, machine learning,
and NLP in general help make information more accessible to everyone, thus
closing the digital divide?
• Besides “more data”, what is needed to make voice-enabled Digital Assistants
a reality for non-English speakers across emerging markets and under-served
populations?

8. Information Technology
• What opportunities exist for
traditional Language Services
Providers to work side by side with
Computational Linguists on voice-
enabled solutions?
• Most LSPs have managed to adjust
to Machine Translation, what can
they do to succeed and strive in the
area of Speech-to-Speech?
What’s in It for Me?