Over the past five years, conversational applications have entered the mainstream. Virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, and Alexa field tens of billions of voice and natural language queries every month. Voice-enabled devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home reside in over a hundred million homes and represent one of the fastest-growing product categories of all time.

Given this widespread consumer adoption, many global corporations are investing heavily inConversational AIto realize a similar game-changing transformation in the modern enterprise. The challenge however, is that nearly all software developers and data scientists still struggle to build truly reliable and useful conversational experiences for enterprise use cases. While there is an abundance of academic research and open-source software covering the topic, there are few practical resources to help guide engineers toward building production-quality conversational applications suitable for enterprise deployment.

Cisco, as the global leader in enterprise voice technology, has been at the forefront of many of the advances in Conversational AI over the past decade. In 2017, Cisco acquired MindMeld, which pioneered and commercialized one of the industry