Flag

We stand with Ukraine and our team members from Ukraine. Here are ways you can help

Get exclusive access to thought-provoking articles, bonus podcast content, and cutting-edge whitepapers. Become a member of the UX Magazine community today!

Home ›› Artificial Intelligence ›› Does Conversational AI Do Magic?

Does Conversational AI Do Magic?

by Anna Gregorczyk
4 min read
Share this post on
Tweet
Share
Post
Share
Email
Print

Save

What will the AI future look like – bright and easily manageable or dark and full of risks? Discover the various perspectives of the European Chatbot & Conversational AI summit speakers.

The first day of the conference

Does Conversational AI do magic? I could verify this during the 2nd edition of the European Chatbot & Conversational AI summit.

The below summary is just a glance at what happened during the first day. I had no time to listen to all speeches (as some of them were conducted parallelly).

The below summary is for those who did not participate in the event and those who did but would like to have at hand a short reminder of concepts, advice, and golden thoughts said on the 1st of March 2022.

The participants were from many countries and different locations. Although it was the European Summit we had an audience from South America, Australia, North America, Asia, and Europe. Worth to mention there were also representatives from Ukraine. I hope they’ll be able to make a good deal here, as they really need support. RK?

Future – bright of dark?

Can we have a proactive AI assistant that will guess our needs and will do what is needed on our behalf? Some of us dream about knowledgeable, proactive, adaptive, and empathetic software that would do whatever we expected. But if this AI is to be smarter than humans, why don’t we trust it?

Jeff Dalton & Jeff Blankenburg discussed the future. They delivered 2 separate lectures where they tried to make a sneak peek into the future of collaborative task assistants that we are waiting for. Jeff Dalton explained what the current possibilities were. Seems like AI still cannot bring me a cappuccino. Why? The answer was provided by Sudha Mani in her fantastic speech about why AI infrastructure is failing and what can be done about it. Mani impressed me not only with her deep knowledge but also with her fantastic way of doing presentations. She could deliver training on presentation skills as well, but I totally understand that AI is more interesting :D. The speaker presented the impact of AI, risk & challenges after implementation. I could learn what are the different levels of AI, AI infrastructure layers, and the barriers to AI deployment. Then Mani advised what 6 core business areas need to be defined when we go for AI.

But if we still dream of the future, it would be good to follow Jeff Dalton on implementing Dialog State Tracking Models, thinking about rich sensing capabilities, and task decisions based on the search using context.

When Jeff Blankenburg showed headlines about AI outperforming doctors, he also had shown people do not trust it. Why?

Tips & tricks

Building trust was one of advice from several speeches with tips & tricks. We could learn from OpenDialog representatives: Maaike Coppens and Ronald Ashri. They told us how to work on conversational collaboration. It is about knowing your user, building trust, and about getting insights from use cases to create proper intents. Then if we were thinking intents, it was good to get knowledge from Maaike Groenewege. The linguist and the most passionate and cheerful person today. She explained how to create, define, clean, balance, and test proper utterances in. She also invited everybody to her Convo.club. Another set of advice we had from Marc Pedri from Evo Dynamics who proposed how to improve AI conversational solutions using data. Everything counts from customer understanding mentioned by Maaike and Ronald to the observation of default fallbacks, funnels, and flow breaks. Greg Bennet reminded to remember that voice is not text. So, when designing a conversational AI solution, we must know what type of interaction we propose to users Text-Forward, Voice-Forward, or Voice-Centric. He reminded about troubles with sonic indication and gave a proposition to fix them.

Research

Other Dialogue challenges, especially in multifunctional conversational AI were discussed by group of scientists and researchers. One of the most interesting topics for me were 2 approaches to inclusion of the sign language. How to capture it with a camera and interpret it, and how to “translate” into text.

Success stories and lessons learned

We could also listen to a few presentations about cooperation with customers and exemplary successful products. We could familiarize ourselves with lessons learned by inChat.

We could also learn the good, the bad, and the ugly experiences of David Low on examples of Skyscanner app in cooperation with Alexa. Then a Danish Insurance company representatives presented the history of Albotta – the chatbot of the Alm company. The product I loved most was BuroKratt. An application available in Estonia, that every citizen of every country dream of. All government services and information are available through a virtual assistant by text and voice. Police & Border control, consumer protection, national library, and more. I’d love such (anti)Beaurocrat in Poland.     

There were a few more sessions that I listened to, but as it is 22:00 now I need to stop writing. If you think I missed something important or I misunderstood any concept, please let me know in the comments.

What is the golden thought for you?

The one I took, and slightly paraphrased is:

 “The context influences the design & the design influences the context”

The European Chatbot is a two-day networking event that promotes the use of conversational AI in Europe. It brings together visionary speakers, researchers, industry-wide executives, and adopters of Conversational AI, cutting-edge chatbots, and conversational AI technology providers to facilitate a discussion on the latest trends, future innovations, policies, and regulations in the conversational AI space.

Get a 50% discount using code UXMEG23 for this year’s event! Follow the links to buy tickets now: Agorify, Eventbrite.

The European Chatbot & Conversational AI Summit – the event for leading minds in Conversational AI.

post authorAnna Gregorczyk

Anna Gregorczyk

Multilingual Conversation Designer with 20 years of experience in IT and in copywriting.

Tweet
Share
Post
Share
Email
Print
Ideas In Brief
  • The author shares insights on the risks, and opportunities of AI technologies as well as success stories and lessons learned from the second edition of the European Chatbot & Conversational AI summit.
  • The golden thread leading the summary is the future of AI implementation shown through the prism of various experts in the field.
  • The speakers talk about different industries that will be hugely influenced by AI technologies – medicine, business, insurance, personal assistance services, and more.

Related Articles

“Design is dead”? No, you just never understood it. This bold piece calls out lazy hot takes, holds designers accountable, and makes a sharp case for what design really is (and isn’t) in the age of AI.

Article by Nate Schloesser
Design Isn’t Dead. You Sound Dumb
  • The article challenges the claim that “design is dead,” blaming both outsiders and designers for misunderstanding or misrepresenting the field.
  • It argues that AI threatens only superficial design, not true design, and calls for a more mature, collaborative mindset.
Share:Design Isn’t Dead. You Sound Dumb
6 min read

AI that always agrees? Over-alignment might be the hidden danger, reinforcing your misconceptions and draining your mind. Learn why this subtle failure mode is more harmful than you think — and how we can fix it.

Article by Bernard Fitzgerald
Introducing Over-Alignment
  • The article explores over-alignment — a failure mode where AI overly validates users’ assumptions, reinforcing false beliefs.
  • It shows how this feedback loop can cause cognitive fatigue, emotional strain, and professional harm.
  • The piece calls for AI systems to balance empathy with critical feedback to prevent these risks.
Share:Introducing Over-Alignment
4 min read

As AI assistants quietly absorb the tasks once held by human secretaries, are we erasing the hidden influence of women in the workplace, or simply rewriting it in code?

Article by Thasya Ingriany
Built to Serve: AI, Women, and the Future of Administrative Work
  • The article explores how administrative labor, long feminized and overlooked, is being automated away — and what we stand to lose if we let AI take the place of trust, intuition, and institutional memory.
Share:Built to Serve: AI, Women, and the Future of Administrative Work
7 min read

Join the UX Magazine community!

Stay informed with exclusive content on the intersection of UX, AI agents, and agentic automation—essential reading for future-focused professionals.

Hello!

You're officially a member of the UX Magazine Community.
We're excited to have you with us!

Thank you!

To begin viewing member content, please verify your email.

Tell us about you. Enroll in the course.

    This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Check our privacy policy and