Based on Michael Vickers’ best-selling book, Becoming Preferred, this keynote presentation teaches leading-edge strategies and tactics that will help place your company in the preferred position every time. Attendees learn how to become unique and distinct in a crowded marketplace, how to bring distinctive value to their customers or clients, how to build long- term economic relationships, and how to create added value to win the price war. This presentation is filled with applicable anecdotes, examples, and strategies that will give your team immediate results.

Where is the industry heading? Voice has taken center stage in the last year, especially since October with the introduction of Siri. Unique and sophisticated apps and services that make the human-machine interaction natural and simple are rapidly coming to market. So how will this spotlight on voice, when combined with the advances in natural language understanding (NLU) and intent-driven interactions, change the way we interact with devices and cars? Are voice-enabled virtual assistants an industry inflection point or just a fad? What technologies will converge to create useful and usable virtual assistants? In addition to smartphones, which devices will be used to interact with virtual assistants? How will businesses, manufacturers, and consumers embrace virtual voice assistants? Which markets and industries stand to benefit the most from the voice-enabled virtual assistant trend?

Today, nearly 10 million people have enrolled in systems or services that use their voiceprints to improve customer care, to reset (and ultimately replace) passwords, to provide irrefutable electronic signatures, or simply to prove they are alive and eligible to receive their pensions. Beyond the basics of using a voice as a biometric means to support identification and verification, the unique characteristics of a person’s utterances are under evaluation for a fascinating set of functions surrounding detection of such human dimensions as sobriety, sentiment, and voracity. The panel members discuss new uses and applications of voice biometrics and how these will impact the security of property, people, and information.