Your company thinking about bots? Check out BotCon Africa

Who says that Africa isn’t on the cutting edge of technology? The continent has earned a reputation for world-leading expertise in mobile money and related sectors, but Africans are also stepping up to the bot challenge.

In fact, the second annual BotCon Africa event takes place on 25 May, featuring a pretty high profile list of speakers.

Probably the most high-profile speaker on the list is research engineer Martin Raison of Facebook AI Research, with a keynote talk titled “teaching machines to interact with people”. Raison originally worked at Wit.ai, a natural language processing platform, before it was bought by the social network.

The second notable keynote speaker is Justin Watson, co-founder of the open-source Botpress framework, whose talk is titled “what makes a great bot?”.

Other notable names in the lineup include Frans Cronje of DataProphet, Angelique Kamara (head of Messenger platform partnerships at Facebook), Nick Cuthbert of WhereIsMyTransport, Toufeeq Ockards of SKA SA and DeBruyn Annandale of IBM/Watson.

“The focus of the conference will be to investigate ways in which AIs and bots can be applied to public and commercial services across Africa,” reads an excerpt of a press release sent to Memeburn.

BotCon Africa takes place on 25 May at Workshop 17.