If you’ve ever wondered how a conversational system like Alexa or a chatbot really works, this is the talk for you. Whether you are designing a chatbot, smart-speaker app or a telephone voice assistant, the underlying technologies are all very similar. We will give an overview of the different technologies that work together to make a conversational voice system work. We will cover speech recognition, language understanding, text to speech, conversation management, and response generation. You should come away with a good understanding of how the different technologies fit together and which bits are true AI and which bits still need skilled designers. You should also get a feel for the rate of progress and which improvements and additional features we may start to see available soon.