The Voicebot Podcast

Edward Saatchi is the founder of Fable Studio which is bringing AR and VR characters to life for the metaverse. Fable is creating both characters and a world where you can interact with them, but more interestingly, where these virtual beings can learn and evolve. Prior to Fable Studio, Saatchi was the founder of the Emmy Award-winning VR movie studio Oculus Story Studio. Earlier, he was the found...

Greg Cross is co-founder and chief business officer of Soul Machines, a leader in the creation of virtual humans (aka digital people). We discuss the origin story that goes back to 2012 as a research organization set up at the University of Aukland through the founding of Soul Machines in 2016, how 2020 accelerated the business, and what is happening today. In addition, we delve into the world of...

Amazon just announced a custom voice assistant deal with Disney and a bushel full of new products including a smart display you hang on the wall and a home robot. After the event concluded, a few of us gathered in the Voicebot Discord Community to discuss what we saw, our initial reactions, and what it is likely to mean for the industry. Plus, we learn which of the new products the podcast guests...

Hannes Heikinheimo co-founded Speechly in 2016 with the vision to create a low-latency, real-time streaming speech recognition API. Today, Speechly offers an API that it says is the fastest voice UI for the web and other platforms. Prior to Speechly, he was a data science partner at Reaktor, a language engineer working on Siri for Apple, the analytics lead at game-maker Rovio, a Senior Data Scient...

Daniel Kornev is chief product officer for DeepPavlov.ai which is the developer behind the open source framework for building voice assistants. The company has raised over $9 million in funding and has over 50,000 downloads and 5000 Stars on GitHub.  In addition, Kornev served as an advisor to the Alexa Prize team from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Before DeepPavlov, Daniel Korne...

Andy Mauro is the CEO of Automat which he co-founded in 2016. Its solution creates personalized shopping experiences for eCommerce that learns the needs of customers through a conversational interaction that then returns better product recommendations and higher conversion rates. The AI part of the solution starts by ingesting a product catalog and labeling the content to help drive better underst...

Jan Sedivy is a Researcher at the Institute of Cybernetics and Robotics at the Czech Technical University (CTU) and a member of the faculty of electrical engineering. This is also his alma mater where he earned a PhD in 1983. Jan served as the faculty leader for Team Alquist from CTU which was the 2021 winner of the Amazon Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge. The SoicalBot Grand Challenge is for...

Voice assistants are used across many devices and in many different contexts. The car is what we characterize as among the big 3 along with smart speakers and smartphones. These are the surfaces that have the largest voice assistant user bases both overall and in terms of active users. The recently published In-Car Voice Assistant Consumer Adoption Report for 2021 is the jumping-off point for toda...

Ryan Star is CEO and founder of Stationhead, a social audio app that enables anyone to start their own social, global radio program. He is a recording artist that got his big break playing at CBGBs in New York and then opening for Bon Jovi when he was still in high school. Today, he has more than 40 million plays on Spotify and around 200,000 monthly listeners. Ryan has worked in entertainment lon...

Ryan Steelberg is President of Veritone. He co-founded the company with his brother in 2014 and it became publicly traded on NASDAQ in 2017. Ryan has a notable record of successful startup exits in his career that spans 25 years in tech. In earlier companies, as you will hear today, the Steelberg brothers applied large-scale data processing to advertising before that was commonplace and were instr...

Bernadette Nixon is CEO of Algolia, a company that processes more than 1.5 trillion searches per year for over 10,000 customers. She joined the company in early 2020 in the midst of the global pandemic and what turned out to be explosive growth. Prior to Algolia, Nixon was CEO of Alfresco, President of SDL, and an SVP at OpenText. She has worked across the spectrum of search from pure SaaS solutio...

Conversation designers Diana Deibel and Rebecca Evanhoe discuss the practical knowledge required to design effective conversations with things such as chatbots and voice assistants. We also discuss the evolution of conversation design over time and across modes of interaction. Diana Deibel is a director at Grand Studio where she helps clients create user-focused experiences, including many that in...

Natalie Monbiot is head of strategy and business development for Hour One. She is working with companies across a number of industries as varied as real estate, eLearning, automotive, and consumer brands and is shaping Hour One's go-to-market and growth strategies. Prior to Hour One, Monbiot was an SVP at Publicis where she worked on new technologies and the Samsung account. She was an SVP at UM W...

Yakir Buskilla is CEO and co-founder of Cocohub, a publicly traded company on the Israeli stock exchange best known for its no-code chatbot development suite. Recently, the company is increasingly associated with virtual human technology, and Anna, one of the characters it developed as a chatbot avatar for deployment on Zoom and through other video channels. Buskilla took over as CEO after several...

Orchid Bertelsen is head of digital strategy and innovation at Nestle USA. She has created the digital innovation road maps for over 40 Nestle brands as well as delivering new projects such as Ruth the cookie coach virtual human. Prior to Nestle, Orchid spent several years in the digital agency world and in consulting. Today we discuss the anatomy of a virtual human project for a consumer brand -...

Brandon Kaplan is CEO of Skilled Creative, an agency he founded in 2017 that focuses on helping leading media and consumer brands deploy voice technologies for user engagement and commerce. Today, we discuss his firm's work with HBO, Pottermore, Meredith, and a few consumer brands along with dominant trends in the industry. Kaplan received an outstanding achievement award for industry contribution...

Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek is founder and CEO of the non-profit Women in Voice which was started in 2018. She is an advisor to several companies in the voice AI space, a popular conference speaker, and a consultant for voice user experience design. After earning an undergraduate degree in French, Photography, and Graphic Design, Bajorek received a Masters in Linguistics from UC Davis and then of Ph...

Brad Stone is the New York Times bestselling author of two books about Amazon, The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound. Together, they tell a complete story of Amazon over 25 years of evolution. Amazon Unbound includes an in-depth look at the origin behind Amazon Alexa and Echo and their implications for the industry. Stone is a senior executive editor overseeing tech industry reporting at Bloombe...

Joseph Turow is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication -- the same school where he earned his PhD. Turow is the author of over 150 articles and 10 books including the recently published The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet. He has some pointed critiques of how voice technology is used, what s...

Ian Freed is co-founder and CEO of Bamboo Learning, the creators of award-winning Alexa skills for childhood education. As you know, 2020 changed everything in education and Bamboo is filling an interesting gap for in-home learning since 2018. Before Bamboo, Ian spent nearly 13 years at Amazon. While there he served in the coveted Tech Assistant to the CEO role where he was Jeff Bezos' shadow for...

Danny Tomsett is the founder and CEO of UneeQ. He founded the company in 2009. It was originally called FaceMe and was focused on video chat with humans for customer service. The idea was ahead of its time. Several years ago the company shifted to the virtual human solution at a time when conversational AI and visual rendering techniques were just coming into their own. UneeQ today is one of the l...

Lauren Kunze became CEO of Pandorabots in 2013. However, her involvement with the company goes back to 2002. As a teenager she developed one of the first chatbots, Lauren bot, using the company's technology. So, Lauren has had a front row seat to the many phases of bot development. Twenty years' worth of insights. She graduated from Harvard with degrees in English and Neurobiology.   Pandorabots h...

Rob Hayes is head of product at Voiceflow. He spent the past 18 months helping transform the no-code builder for Alexa skills into a multi-platform design and prototyping solution for enterprise-grade conversational experiences. Today, Voiceflow has over 60,000 users of its software which offers some unique insights into trends for the conversation design and development communities.  Prior to Voi...

Amir Hirsh (CEO) and Gal Klein (CTO) are co-founders of Audioburst. We gathered in Clubhouse to discuss analyzing, segmenting, packaging and making talk audio content discoverable in real-time. Audioburst is doing this daily on millions of minutes of radio and podcast content and the same technology could be applied to social audio. We discuss how it could make social audio conversations more easi...

Spotify recently released a custom voice assistant called 'Hey Spotify,' acquired (then rebranded) Locker Room as the foundation of a new social audio feature, and announced a new in-car voice-interactive device for audio content while on the go. I gathered some Spotify experts in Clubhouse to break down Spotify's voice AI and social audio strategy and its implications. Guests include: Air Greenbe...