Call for Speakers for Conversations
This is the second year that we've announced a Call for Speakers for Conversations, and I'm hoping that it's even more successful than the first year.
Last year was the first year we held a formal call for presentations… except in 2006 we called it a "Call for Papers", not a "Call for Speakers." It's amazing what one word can do to change the sorts of submissions one receives. By calling it a Call for Papers last year, we ended up receiving a lot of research-oriented papers: better ways to perform speech recognition, methodologies and tools to make deployments theoretically faster, While I’m sure those would be very interesting topics (I found them interesting just to read about them!), they are not what we're aiming for when it comes to session topics and the audience that we have at Conversations. Technically, I believe a “Call for Papers” is a more appropriate term for technical conferences where actual research papers are submitted and archived for the attendee’s future reference.
The other (rather unsurprising) issue is that we received a lot of speaker suggestions that, quite frankly, were just pitches – here’s how our products/services/patents/ideas can help you if you work with us. Our partner community is extremely valuable to us, but from past experience we’ve found that people come to the sessions to learn and share experiences… and not to be sold to. (The solutions showcase area is set aside for those sorts of product and partner specific conversations. We try really hard to promote the sessions as sharing and learning, and the solutions showcase for folks researching products and services.) That said, it *is* a Nuance user conference, and so we will have sessions (with mostly Nuance presenters) focused on the latest technology and solutions provided by Nuance itself. But even then, we try to avoid explicitly pushing products – the goal is to have sessions that tell you, not sell you.
In the end, I expect that once again this year we’ll have a fine selection of Nuance customers that… how did I put it in the FAQ? That’s right… “informative, widely applicable content based on real-world case studies that show measurable results and demonstrate lessons learned.” The feedback forms we get every year vary widely in opinion, but one thing they often agree on is that people want to see and hear examples. Did it work? How well did it work? What went wrong? How did you fix it? Should I be doing that too? That’s what some of the most highly rated sessions have been – people telling a story about how they improved their customer service with Nuance products and services… backed up with proof, not hand-waving.
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