Going to Conference. Should I pay attention to conversational UI?

So I am going to my first conference later this month! Pretty exciting!

There is ONE LAST choice to make, however, and I would like some help with making a decision. As many of you know, I am pretty fresh to UX, but I have really developed a passion for it, and I want to practise it professionally. I am still not ready to apply for jobs, I am still working on that portfolio.
At the conference, I have two goals:

  • Learning as much as humanly possible
  • Networking

I have to choose this last track. I have been pretty certain about the other tracks, but here, I turn to our community for advice.


##OPTION A

Design Salon: Embrace Failure!
A moderated discussion with Rahul Sen from Spotify and Nicolas Felton from Feltron, who will discuss how failure impacts design decisions and how we embrace failure in the future. Questions encouraged.

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Is your design flexible?
Yesenia Perez, design director with Fox Media, “will share her experiences with creating a unified and flexible core design system that accommodates eight media brands amongst others Vox, the Verge with distinct editorial strategies. She’ll share the challenges she faced, and how a scenario-driven design practice helps you create more flexible design systems.”

##OPTION B

Workshop: Conversational UI
In this workshop seems to be about making computers understand context, and voice interfaces.
“Anyone, who have tried to have a meaningful conversation with Siri, Alexa or one of the other digital assistants, have experienced their inability to understand even the simplest things. For instance: Where am I?. And no, I don’t mean my GPS coordinates, but in what context. In a meeting? At the beach? Think of context as a shared state of mind. An invisible cloud that contains all our emotions, knowledge, facts, expectations, manners, culture. That is context. We take it for granted, but computers have no clue. In this workshop, we will explore how we, who possess the immense power of the human brain, can help computers better understand the context.”

My thoughts:
I am really interested in Yesenia Perez’ talk, but I feel like conversational UI may be a huge part of our future interactions with our devices. I would love to attend both, but they are in the same time slot.
Conversational UI comes up later, in a discussion session, but I will not be attending that, unfortunately.

Your thoughts?

I’d choose Option A but that’s only because I’m more interested in those topics, not because I have inside knowledge on what would be better or more valuable.

p.s. Yay! Excited for you.

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I appriciate the feedback, HAWK! Do you know of anyone in our community that has more knowledge about conversational UI and AI that you could tag?

I do! @mdrk07