Emily Yellin traversed the country and the world watching, listening, and talking to customers, customer service workers, managers, consultants, and corporate CEOs in a cross-section of industries for her book, Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us. In this presentation, she shares some of the universal truths she found at the global crossroads of customer-company interactions that is customer service. Yellin’s thought-provoking yet practical message and her entertaining, instructive, and revealing anecdotes cut across all industries, nationalities, and levels of technological sophistication.

Language is one of the fundamental aspects of human behavior and is a crucial component of our lives. How can natural language processing (NLP) improve our interactions with computer systems and help us to better understand each other? In the past decade, there has been significant progress in many application areas of NLP, but hard problems remain. What are the current benefits and limitations of NLP? How can you determine if your applications can benefit from NLP? Join James F. Allen, Ph.D., author of the seminal book Natural Language Understanding, as he explains the state of natural language processing today and how close we are to automatic natural language understanding, summarization, translation, and information retrieval. A particular focus will be spent on the use of natural language technologies in dialogue systems.

Panelists from Google, Microsoft, and Symbian

Learn how you can leverage the popularity of smartphones in consumer and enterprise markets. What new customer interaction and employee productivity opportunities are enabled by these devices? What tools and training are available for developers who are looking to develop these new applications? What mix of speech, graphics, text and videos provide the best customer experience? Where are the guidelines for designing user interfaces for smartphones and how can you get started?