The Voicebot Podcast

As promised, today I have part 2 of our 2020 predictions shows. Today, we take a deep dive into multiple conversations about voice app architecture. This is important because it determines how we develop for voice and what governs user experience. I have three guests today that will break down for you what they expect to change in 2020.    John Kelvie from Bespoken joins us from Peru and marks a r...

Today we have part 1 of a two-part series on 2020 predictions with guests from Australia, the UK, and Holland.   I want to give a shoutout to all of the Voice Insider subscribers that offered their predictions for 2020. We had 46 of them in all and you can read the full story at Voicebot.ai. Today, I have 3 of them on the mic to elaborate on their predictions and we will have three more in the nex...

Patricia Scanlon is CEO and founder of Soapbox Labs, the leader in automated speech recognition for kids. You may have observed a child attempting to use an Alexa or Google Assistant device and noticed the success rate of those interactions was noticeably lower than when you use it. A big part of that is due to the fact that the speech recognition models in leading voice assistants are tuned towar...

2019 started out with unbounded optimism around voice technology with rapid smart speaker adoption and Google announcing over 1 billion devices supported the Assistant. It continued with Microsoft pulling Cortana from consumer use case and Samsung adding new capabilities to Bixby while Amazon and Google rapidly expanded features. Then, we had the negative stories about contractors listening to voi...

What are hearables? They are wireless earbuds and headphones that provide always-available voice assistant access. Think AirPods, Pixel Buds, Echo Buds, Galaxy buds. At home, you have an always-listening smart speaker but on the go having that just in your phone is a bit limiting. Connecting the voice assistant from a smartphone to your ears creates a more efficient and private interaction.    Tod...

Privacy and security issues associated with voice assistants have been the biggest stories in the industry so far in 2019. Joining host Bret Kinsella are Rani Molla, the lead data reporter for Recode, Todd Mozer, CEO of Sensory, and Martin Lens-FitzGerald of Open Voice and several other voice-related projects. Molla offers the media perspective, Mozer a 25 year veteran of the industry with in-dept...

Jeff McMahon is CEO and co-founder of Voicify a voice app development platform designed for enterprise marketers. After a career in digital marketing as an agency founder, Jeff and his co-founders saw the need for voice app software that would integrate well with the existing marketing technology stack and be designed for how marketers perform their jobs. We talk about development, day-to-day use,...

Tom Hewitson is CEO and founder of Labworks.io, a voice app studio in London known from some of the most popular games on Alexa such as Would You Rather, Trivia Hero, True or False and Mental Samurai hosted by actor Rob Lowe. In this week's episode, Tom offers 10 Hot Takes from 2.5 Years in voice based on his presentation at the All About Voice Conference in Munich. He touches on some controversia...

Four independent developers discuss their experience building for Samsung Bixby and react to announcements from Samsung Developer Conference 2019, including Bixby Views, templates and working with the IDE. The interviews are conducted onsite at the San Jose Convention Center at SDC19. Host Bret Kinsella is joined by Cory Wixom of Baby Stats, Piyush Hari of Dilli Labs, Lei Xiang from Volley, and Ry...

This week we have four interviews conducted onsite at ConverCon in Dublin in October 2019. First up is Katie McMahon, GM of SoundHound, a leading custom voice assistant development platform, and my guest on Episode #1 of the Voicebot Podcast.   Next in line is Niamh Bushnell, chief communications officer of Soapbox Labs. Soapbox is a pioneer around speech recognition for children. Then we have Dus...

Dr. Larry Heck is CEO of Viv Labs and a Senior Vice President at Samsung. In that role, he oversees all things Bixby. Prior to his work with Bixby, Larry served as head of Samsung's Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Center. He has a deep background and distinguished career in both voice and AI technologies. Prior to Samsung, he was a Research Director at Google leading the Deep Dialogue proje...

Sanjay Dhawan is CEO of Cerence, the recent spin-out company from what used to be known as Nuance Automotive. On October 1st it became a separate company and currently has a half a billion-dollar market cap and $300 million in forecasted 2019 revenue. Cerence has over 60 automotive customers and its technology can be found in 280 million vehicles.  Previously, Dhawan was CTO of Harman Internationa...

This week's interviews were conducted onsite at the All About Voice Conference in Munich, Germany. That enabled us to capture the European (and Isreali and even some U.S.) perspective on voice assistant adoption. The five guests come from France, Germany, Isreal, and Poland. We discuss European voice assistant adoption, voice UX design principles, open source versus proprietary software approaches...

During the Voice 19 conference, I had the opportunity to host a panel discussion of enterprise voice leaders from Nestle, Royal Bank of Canada, and the American Red Cross. We discuss the first multimodal Alexa skill, Nestle Goodness, with Josh Baillon who also reviewed the company's voice strategy pillars of search, commerce, and utility. And, we hit on lessons learned around voice app discovery....

Financial services has become one of the leading industries driving the adoption of voice ad AI technologies. At the Voice 19 conference this year I hosted a panel with Adam Kaye, VP of Architecture Global Business Technology Solutions for Prudential Financial; Mark Jamison, Global Head of Innovation Design for Visa; and, Sunayna Tuteja, head of strategic partnership and emerging technologies at T...

Amazon held its annual Alexa product launch event in September 2019 and there were some expected announcements along with a few surprises. Hearables, smart glasses, smart home, Samuel L. Jackson, Alexa Auto and many more topics were covered in more than 80 announcements. Breaking it all down for you this week are Amazon VP of smart home Daniel Rausch, USA Today's Jefferson Graham, Chris Albrecht o...

Chris Mitchell is CEO and founder of Audio Analytic. He has a Ph. D. in information retrieval from Anglia Ruskin University and also holds degrees in audio and music technology and electrical and electronics engineering. He filed a patent for some of the core technology behind Audio Analytic more than a decade ago after completing his Ph. D. and then accepted a Kaufman Fellowship for entrepreneurs...

Jeff Adams is best known for leading the ASR team that built Amazon's Alexa and we went into that history in-depth in episode 59 last year. He has accumulated over 20 patents in speech technology since the 1990s working as an engineer and CTO for some of the biggest names in the industry. Today, Jeff is CEO of Cobalt Speech which helps develop voice technology for new applications beyond what you...

Gene Munster is managing partner at Loup Ventures, a venture capital fund focused on early-stage investing. We discuss Apple's voice strategy, Voice SEO data, smart speaker sales forecasts and much more. Munster co-founded Loup after 21 years as a research analyst at Piper Jaffrey where he covered familiar names such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. During his career, he has been named Top...

Braden Ream is co-founder and CEO of Voiceflow which was officially founded in 2018. The company initially started around the idea of creating a new company to support the rise of voice assistants and that led the team to create several interactive children's stories using Storyline. They then decided to build their own software to better meet their needs and this software so intrigued investors t...

This week's interviews are all about the intersection of podcasts (the content) and voice assistants (the channel). Interviews were conducted onsite at the Podcast Movement conference. Guests include Zack Reneau-Wedeen of Google followed by Tom Webster from Edison Research, Suzy Schulz of Westwood One, Will Mayo of Spoken Layer and Steve Goldstein from Amplifi Media. We close with Ahmed Bouzid and...

David Isbitski joined the Alexa team in early 2015, shortly after the Amazon Echo launched and before Alexa Skills Kit or the skill store. When he started, it was all about developer office hours, slack groups, and meetups. Today, it is more often about conference keynotes and boardrooms. Bret Kinsella interviewed Dave at the Voice 19 Conference to get a sense about how things have changed over th...

Adam Cheyer is co-founder and VP of Engineering of Viv Labs and Vice President of R&D at Samsung. He is also a founding member of Change.org  and Sentient. Previously, he was co-founder and VP of Engineering at Siri and a director of engineering at Apple. Earlier in his career, Adam held executive roles at SRI International in the computer-human interaction center and the artificial intelligence c...

Voicebot recently surveyed over 300 marketers to determine their enthusiasm and activity around voice assistants as a marketing channel. That report includes 20 charts and 30 pages of analysis and can be downloaded at no cost at voicebot.ai/research. In this episode, host Bret Kinsella is joined by David Ciccarelli, CEO of Voices.com, and Ava Mutchler of Voicebot.ai for an in-depth discussion of t...

Voice Summit 19 was the largest gathering of voice industry professionals globally in 2019. Voicebot took the opportunity to speak with six industry leaders to get their perspective on the conference, where voice adoption has been and where it is headed. Host Bret Kinsella is joined by Amir Hirsh, CEO of Audioburst, Bruce Rase, CEO of AgVoice, Steven Tingiris, CEO of Dabble Labs, Pat Higbie, CEO o...