The Voicebot Podcast

Mark Beccue is principal analyst at market research firm Tractica and recently published a report revealing that the virtual digital assistant software market is nearly $1 billion today and will grow to over $7.7 billion in 2025. The forecast is a bottom-up analysis of hundreds of virtual assistant use cases and we talk about which segments will generate the most software revenue. Mark also goes i...

Cathy Pearl is best known as the author of Designing Voice User Interfaces published by O'Reilly Media. She is currently Vice President of User Experience at Sensely, worked previously at Nuance, was on the Ford Sync team and holds degrees in both Computer Science and Cognitive Science. Cathy even worked at NASA early in her career where she designed user controls that reduced cognitive load for p...

Tobias Goebel is Senior Director, Emerging Technologies for Aspect Software. He has a Masters Degree in Computational Linguistics and has studied at both the University of Bonn and University of Edinburgh. Tobias also has 15 years experience working in voice technology, first as a developer, then as a designer and more recently as a strategist and marketer. Aspect has a big focus on customer servi...

Tim McElreath is Director of Engineering, Mobile and Emerging Platforms at Scripps which among other things owns Food Network and HGTV. Food Network not only has one of the best voice-first Alexa skills and Google Assistant apps, but also represents one of the finest multi-modal deployments that takes advantage of the Amazon Echo Show's screen to display Food Networks' extensive video library. Tim...

Steven Hansen is the CTO of RAIN Agency. RAIN is well known for its more than 30 Alexa skills launched for high profile brands ranging from Tide, Hellmans and Campbell's Soup to Sesame Street and the big budget World War II movie Dunkirk. The company learned something new in each deployment and Steven shares some of the wisdom he and his colleagues have accumulated. He also talks about the company...

Voice assistants and chatbots have ushered in a new UI and interaction model for consumers. Conversational interactions are very different from the structured interfaces we built previously for web and mobile. The analytics and type of data make this clear according to Arte Merritt, CEO of Dashbot.io. Dashbot has analyzed over 22 billion conversational messages from thousands of chatbots and voice...

The consumer electronics show (CES) is visited annually by 180 thousand people and many of the big names in tech have a large presence. CES 2017 was largely regarded as a triumph for Amazon Alexa and was instrumental in raising awareness about voice assistants and how they will fit into the future lives of everyday consumers. It is fair to say that CES 2018 put voice technology on display in an ev...

Todd Mozer is Chairman and CEO of Sensory. He founded the company in 1994 to enable people to communicate with consumer electronics the way we do with each other. Sensory builds software and hardware products for voice recognition, biometric identification and more. Voice is the biggest part of Sensory's portfolio and Todd has over a dozen patents in speech technology. Sensory was pioneering the u...

Owen Brown is co-founder and CTO of Starbutter AI which works at the intersection of virtual assistants and financial products. Starbutter is a leading developer on both Google Assistant and Facebook Messenger. The company's current conversational apps help consumers choose financial products with the best features. Starbutter's Credit Card Helper won awards in four categories of the 2017 Actions...

A lot happened in 2017 related to voice assistants. Voice app growth, rapid consumer adoption, monetization, smart speakers vs voice assistants on smartphones, the YouTube kerfuffle, the Google Home Mini recording fiasco, will.i.am raising over $100 million and much more. We even conclude the episode with predictions for 2018. I am joined by three industry experts: Adam Marchick CEO of VoiceLabs,...

Oren Jacob is co-founder and CEO of Pullstring. Founded in 2011, Pullstring is maker of Converse, an enterprise SaaS platform for building, deploying and maintaining conversational apps. Oren discusses how his 20-year career making movies at Pixar influences his approach to voice app and multimodal design. He goes into how the company started, how things were different before Amazon Echo, how the...

TRT World is a global news media organization headquartered in Istanbul, Turkey. Derrick Fountain oversees TRT World's product and R&D group and has led the launch of three Alexa skills and Google Assistant apps. TRT World has a news-based voice app as you might expect, but Derrick's team has also built two games that reinforce the company's mission around news and its brand. One of them recently...

Matt Hartman is a partner at Betaworks, a venture fund and innovation firm. Betaworks has made several investments in voice technology and recently hosted the 12-week Voicecamp Accelerator that helped incubate eight startups in tools and entertainment categories. Matt also has a popular voice technology newsletter called Hearing Voices. In this week's interview, Matt talks about voice technology s...

Shane Mac is CEO and co-founder of Assist which provides a voice and chatbot platform for brands looking to engage consumers. The platform works across multiple voice and chat services including Facebook Messenger, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Shane recounts how he first started in voice four years ago and the lessons learned working with brands ranging from Sephora and Hyatt to Fandango and...

Peter Nann is the speech and automation lead at Salmat and has worked in speech technology since 1993. He started as a software developer and by 2001 was a senior voice user interface architect. His focus today is voice design, analysis and improving existing voice systems. In this week's interview, Peter recounts the evolution of voice user experience over more than 20 years, offers some tips on...

David Watkins is Service Director for Connected Home Devices at research firm Strategy Analytics, and is one of the leading analysts tracking the voice assistant and smart speaker markets. David takes a data-first approach to analyzing adoption of Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod, Alibaba Tmall Genie and dozens of other smart speakers under development by software companies, device manufact...

Hicham Tahiri is the founder and CEO of Smartly.ai . While Hicham started as an embedded systems engineer, he began his job as a voice user interface designer way back in 2006 and has spent most of his career focused on voice technology. He later founded what became Smartly in 2011 to help companies building robots and cars integrate speech recognition and interaction into their solutions. When Am...

Brad Abrams is Group Product Manager for Google Assistant. He takes time in this interview to share experiences from the first year of the voice assistant platform. From the launch of Google Assistant on Google Home and smartphones, to the expansion into seven different countries with more on the way, Brad shares some surprises and little known facts about the platform. He also answers questions r...

Jan König is CEO of Jovo, a company providing a framework and tools for building robust multi-modal apps that include voice. Along with Alex Swetlow, Jan founded Jovo in 2017, recently graduated from Betaworks Voicecamp accelerator and released the company's first product. Jan discusses how he and Alex came to their idea for Jovo and the premise behind building voice-first apps that are consistent...

David is a partner and co-founder at NextView Ventures. The firm just raised a new $50 million fund for seed stage investments in the Everyday Economy. In this interview, David Beisel talks about super technologies, innovation waves, how voice and AI will play a role in the things we do every day and three strategies for driving discovery of a new Alexa skill. David previously published a voice co...

Pat Higbie is CEO and co-founder of XAPPmedia which delivers voice interactive apps and managed services for media and brands looking to connect with consumers on Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana or other platforms. Pat has worked in voice technology for a decade and co-founded XAPP in 2012, well before Amazon Echo launched. The company first worked with mobile audio apps to voice...

Peter Cahill has been working in voice technology for 15 years. He has a PhD. in Text-to-Speech, was a professor of speech technology at the University of Dublin and more recently founded speech technology platform, Voysis. Voysis raised $8 million in VC funding in February 2017 and has offices in Dublin, Boston and Edinburgh. While Peter expects Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri will have g...

Jo Jaquinta has been a developer for 20 years and started developing games for Amazon Alexa in 2015. Since that time, he has written two books on voice application development for Alexa and become a leading game developer on both the Alexa and Google Assistant platforms. Jo shares what he has learned about designing games for voice, developing within current constraints, options for monetization a...

Bryan Moffett is COO of National Public Media, a subsidiary of audio content powerhouse NPR. NPR began working with voice interaction on mobile in 2014, was embedded as news in the early days of Alexa but really began to focus on the potential of voice assistants when they served 500k users on Christmas day in 2016. Bryan talks about NPR's strategy and what they learned from the most in-depth ethn...

Jess Williams and Oscar Merry started working with Amazon Alexa in 2015 while at Accenture and then left to start their own London-based digital agency dedicated to voice, Opearlo. After working with Unilever and other big brands they passed the reigns to a colleague, founded a new company called Life Bot and joined the Y Combinator Accelerator. Jess and Oscar have learned a lot about building voi...