TADHack-mini Orlando Chats It Up With Intelligent Agents

Returning for its fourth year, TADHack-mini Orlando will take place this year on March 28-29, the weekend before Enterprise Connect, and will be sponsored by Sangoma, Apidaze, Asterisk, Simwood, Intelepeer, and Inference Solutions. Unlike past TADHACK-mini events, we’ve added a theme this year, “intelligent agents/assistants that use conversational interfaces,” and have the support of renowned conversational commerce expert Dan Miller, Opus Research, who will judge finalists on Sunday and support the event in its run-up.

 

This a particularly timely TADHack because hundreds of millions of people have grown comfortable carrying out their daily commerce using their own words through a conversational intelligent assistant. Whether they are called skills, actions, chatbots, or IVR scripts, they are the product of skills and creativity of citizen developers at banks, retailers, healthcare providers, government agencies, and others.

 

Communications is now democratized – anyone can program them. You can add programmable voice, calling, text messages (SMS and IM), audio and video messages, video calling, faxing, secure communications and authentication, decentralized communications, mobile payments, and much much more through easy-to-use APIs/SDKs, and even easier to use GUIs. The benefits go beyond IT too. Whenever developers get together to use all the tools, data and compute resources that solution providers offer, we collectively discover what’s possible and put it into practice, to improve not just customer care but ultimately quality of life.

 

In this spirit of finding what’s possible, TADHack each year brings together students, graphic designers, project and product managers, IT managers, computer programmers, subject-matter-experts, and anyone interested in the topic to collaborate on a programmable telecoms software project. Non-coders are more than welcomed to join. To see what was made possible at past events, here are projects from past winners:

 

●    Justin Haefner, then UC architect at Medtronic, with his Elder Connected Care hack, created an application that streamlines elder care for family, friends, and nurses. During the event, Haefner hacked the RingCentral platform, demonstrated many of his idea for features, and ultimately took home $3k in prize money.

●    Hunter Henry, Travis Konarik, and Mathew Tanner used Zang from Avaya to develop a product to ease customer frustration while waiting on hold for customer service. By providing a channel of entertainment during the holding process, it alleviates frustration. The hack provides customers with the ability to play games or allows them to select music to listen to while waiting. From this hack, they won a consulting contract and ultimately some became full-time employees with the company.