The Voicebot Podcast

Jean-Baptiste Martinoli's current job title is full stack innovator. That seems about right given what he done lately with generative AI tools. One of his latest creations, "Exrtraterrestrial Message," won the award for the best Sci-Fi short film at the Golden Minds film festival. The film was entirely created with generative AI tools. Today's interview was conducted at the Synthedia conference an...

Muddu Sudhakar is the founding CEO of Aisera an automation software company built around conversational AI technologies. He breaks down how the company began with internal helpdesk solutions and moved into other parts of the enterprise, including dev ops, contact center, and broader customer experience solutions. He stresses how all of Aisera solutions are focused on automating business processes....

Voice summit is the largest annual gathering of conversational AI professionals. Voicebot took the opportunity to interview several industry leaders to get their perspectives on the conversational AI market today and where it is headed. In this Part 2 from the Voice 2022 interviews, we have six more guests, including:   - Sara Taheri of Prudential interviewing Kan Simms, VUX World (6:08)   - Brand...

Voice summit is the largest annual gathering of conversational AI professionals. Voicebot took the opportunity to interview several industry leaders to get their perspectives on the conversational AI market today and where it is headed. Guests include: - Michal Stanislawek, Utter One / VoiceLunch (6:25) - Rupal Patel, Veritone (12:57) - Jeff McMahon, Voicify (18:46) - Collin Borns, Speechly (25:44...

Anne Spalter is a world-renowned artist with artwork in museums, galleries, and collections throughout the globe. She is known for having created the curriculum for the first university-level digital art programs. That work was for the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University in the 1990s.  More recently, Anne has emerged as a pioneer in creating fine art using AI-based text-to-image gen...

Greg Cross, CEO and co-founder of Soul Machines recently took to the stage at the Synthedia synthetic media conference with a discussion titled: "The Robots are Coming and We Need Them Now." His thesis that we are already living in the future because the events over the past two years have accelerated societal change is backed up by mounting data. One area that is greatly impacted is the accelerat...

Shiv Rao is a cardiologist that co-founded Abridge in 2018 to help patients and doctors get better results from their encounters. Abridge listens to the doctor-patient conversations, provides a transcription, and categorizes specific details such as medications, symptoms, diagnoses, procedures, and the care plan. Patients can access the conversation details through a mobile app that also highlight...

Dylan Fox founded Assembly AI in 2017 and was part of the Y Combinator Accelerator that year. Prior to founding the company, Dylan was a senior software engineer at Cisco.  Assembly AI fashions itself as an expert in AI model training and provisioning. It researches the new AI models, trains and then deploys them and makes the models available as a service to other companies. The idea is to give d...

Rabi Gupta and his co-founder created Evabot, the gifting assistant, in 2017. The company went through the Boost VC accelerator, where he was also an entrepreneur in residence, in 2017. Rabi was also CEO and co-founder of iCouchapp, which was acquired by Vidooly in 2016. Our discussion today is about a practical application for a virtual assistant. The corporate gift-giving market is $250 billion...

Nick Schwab is making his record fifth appearance on the Voicebot Podcast. You can hear him previously on episodes 2, 22, 58, and 96. In fact, I recommend you check out episodes 2 and 58 to learn more about his background and a sense of how his business has evolved from deal of the day to stock ticker to sleep sounds empire. The more notable aspects of Nick's appearance today are that he has not b...

Val Jones joined Storyfile as CTO in January 2021 after a leadership role at Raxium and 16 years at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. The institute has been at the forefront of synthetic media research and innovation for more than a decade.  Storyfile has products that might be thought of by some as virtual humans or digital twins, but the company characterizes its solution as conversat...

Mark Fosdike co-founded Datch in 2017 after spending several years as an aircraft systems design engineer at CAV aerospace. His co-founder also had experience in industrial manufacturing at Siemens and Transpower. Both are engineers, so they had a keen sense of the challenges of getting access to information and entering data while working with heavy equipment in industrial manufacturing.   Mark b...

Paul Cutsinger is the director of Nvidia Omniverse Exchange, a platform for building simulation and metaverse environments. He discusses how companies are using Omniverse to simulate operations to improve efficiency and reduce operational risk, in addition to capabilities around metaverse and virtual human development. Prior to Nvidia, Paul ran developer education and evangelism programs for Amazo...

Charles Cadbury breaks down how voice assistants can be used to drive awareness and sales for consumer brands. Say It Now was founded in 2018 and won the European Alexa Cup in 2019. The company made headlines during the COVID-19 pandemic when it rolled out a solution to help raise funds for charities through smart speakers. Learnings from that initiative led to the development of Say It Now's Acti...

John Goscha founded Native Voice in 2020 to enable any custom voice assistant to become a first-class citizen on any device. That means it is not behind another voice assistant or buried in an app. It can instead be activated directly from any device by its branded wake word.    We talk about why this is important to brands looking to deepen their relationship with customers and make access to the...

Evan MacMillan started Gridspace 10 years ago to tackle a tough problem faced by contact centers: analyzing their conversational data. It's an application that stands apart from most conversational AI solutions with its focus on conversational intelligence as opposed to self-service.    Before co-founding Gridspace, MacMillan was a co-founder at Zappedy, which was acquired by Groupon during the he...

The Amazon Alexa Live event for 2022 introduced a couple of dozen new features for developers, new revenue-sharing agreements, and is ushering in a new era of simultaneous voice assistants.  The Two Voice Devs, Allen Firstenberg (Google Assistant GDE) and Mark Tucker (Alexa Champion), along with Voicebot's Eric Schwartz and Bret Kinsella break down the announcements and sort through the type of im...

David Liu is CEO of Sonde Health, a company using vocal biomarkers to assess patient health, wellness, and fitness. The company is white labeling its solution for app developers with initial products for respiratory and mental health problems.  In the interview, Liu discusses the product, technology, and key markets serving as the first adopters. These include healthcare providers and payers along...

Timo Kunz has a PhD in operations research and spent more than a decade as a data scientist and analyst before founding Aflorithmic Labs in 2019. The company's first product, API.audio, is a developer toolset for quickly adding synthetic voice audio combined with other features such as music and effects. It is promoted as the first audio-as-a-service solution for developers that enables control of...

Voice assistants are broadly adopted by consumers and for several consumer facing activities such as customer support. Kim Conti, vice president of product, and Chen Zhang, chief technology officer of RAIN Agency share their experience building custom voice assistants for enterprise processes and products in general and more recently for deskless workers. They also share the details behind their b...

Topics today include Amazon's new Astro Robot in operation, the rise of voice AI in the contact center, the increase in acquisitions and large funding rounds, custom branded assistants, Google's sunsetting of conversational actions, and a whole lot more.   Speakers breaking down the news of 2022 so far: - Sarah Andrew Wilson - former CCO at Matchbox.io before Volley acquisition - Paul Sweeney - ch...

Braden Ream is CEO of Voiceflow, a leading conversational AI design collaboration solution combined with a no-code platform for deploying voice apps. Voiceflow was founded in 2019 and has tens of thousands of users and more than 400 companies.  Today we discuss Voiceflow's evolution into enterprise solutions, its expanding feature base, and the top customer use cases. We also delve into how the co...

James Poulter and Vixen Labs along with the Open Voice Network and Veritone surveyed 6000 consumers in the U.S., UK, and Germany about their perception and use of voice assistants and smart speakers. We break down the findings and discuss the implications for the industry as a whole. Trends, data, industry news -- all the things you like.    Poulter co-founded Vixen Labs in 2018. He previously was...

Google announced it will be sunsetting support for third-party conversational actions–the voice apps that work with Google Assistant–in June 2023. It decided there was no point in maintaining a separate app store just for voice and it is encouraging conversational action developers to port their experiences over to Android apps. This special edition of the Voicebot Podcast showcases Allen Firstenb...

Brandon Kaplan founded Skilled Creative in 2017 and continues to serve as CEO. The agency is well known for delivering voice AI strategy, solutions, and analytics for top media and consumer good companies ranging from Meredith and HBO to Pottermore and Pepsico. In 2022, Skilled Creative was merged with two other agencies to form Journey to create a new "experience" agency with expertise in immersi...