aiGrunn 2023

This year I visited aiGrunn. I got the tip to visit this event from a coworker. When looking online I immediately recognized the art style from PyGrunn. Overall the visual impression and style was very well executed. I really liked how they integrated the Groninger word for egg (ai) into the design and opening talk. The audience was asked to hold an imaginary egg and respond to a series of questions with “ai”. The final question was a very relieving and self-aware “who’s tired of these questions?”

Most of the talks were about Large Language Models (LLM’s) which is to be expected in the current year. There were some interesting talks nonetheless. I especially liked Emil Loer’s talk about Real-time speech recognition. He talked about using LLM’s in the context of drive-through restaurant order taking. I found the part about deciding where to run the different parts of the application. Where perform text to speech, do inference, generate the response audio etc. There is a balance between accuracy and response time. Response time during a conversation is very important because the user can easily get frustrated by a second of silence. I think there might be an application for my own work as well in the context of customer service calls.

Overall I would recommend this conference, and will try to visit again if they organize it next year.