Two Voice Devs

Wishing you the warmest of holiday seasons from all of us at Two Voice Devs and the #VoiceFirst Community Choir. Featuring Jeff Blankenberg Maaike Coppens Jessica Earley-Cha Pete Erickson Lisa Falkson Nick Felker Allen Firstenberg Dana Gibson Tom Hewitson Toni Klopfenstein Cathy Pearl Noelle Russell Nick Schwab Jon Stine Mark Tucker Denis Valášek Sarah Wilson with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant...

The biggest buzz the past few weeks have been about ChatGPT from OpenAI, with some folks in the #VoiceFirst community pondering how this is going to change the nature of conversation design and voice development. Mark and Allen talk about what works with ChatGPT, what doesn't, and how voice developers might be thinking about it's role with building conversational apps and platforms in the future....

The tech industry isn't always full of better and better things happening. Sometimes... there are setback, reassignments, poor sales, and layoffs. The recent news out of Amazon, particularly in the hardware and Alexa division, and with the Google Assistant have indicated that the #VoiceFirst movement may have hit some hard times. Allen and Mark talk about what's going on and extend our best hopes...

As Google has been sunsetting conversational actions, they've been ramping up with support for the new App Actions for Google Assistant. Mark and Allen discuss what App Actions offer for both users and developers and how this compares and contrasts to skills for Amazon's Alexa and apps for Apple's Siri

We'd like to extend our thanks to so many people in the #VoiceFirst community, our jobs, our family... and you, our listeners.

Mark sits down with Brett Adler, developer of the award winning VoicePT skill, to discuss his background in software development, low code and no code tools, and how his personal experiences brought him to developing a multi-modal #VoiceFirst assistant that helps physical therapy patients do their exercises. More about VoicePT at https://devpost.com/software/voicept

When you're seeing each other for the first time in 3 years, you make it an event! That's what Mark and Allen recently did when they met up at the 2022 Voice Summit in Alexandria, VA. And what better way to commemorate the event than to record a session of Two Voice Devs live in front of an audience? Why, to welcome questions from that audience! Hear our thoughts on #VoiceFirst topics from what de...

Not every technology we deal with in Voice is a #VoiceFirst technology, sometimes we need some "adjacent" skill. This week, Mark discusses some recent issues he had involving the validation signature that Alexa provides to skills that run outside AWS Lambda, and Allen provides his perspectives about how these same issues were addressed using Google's Dialogflow. Resources: https://developer.amazon...

Allen may be well known for coordinating his wardrobe with his Google Glass, but he's also as passionate about Glass as he is about Voice. With recent announcements coming from Google about Enterprise Glass v2, Mark asks Allen about what developers should be expecting for Glass' future. And where, exactly, does voice fit into that anyway? More about Glass: Glass Info: https://www.google.com/glass/...

Now that Mark and Allen have returned from #VOICE22, they take a look at what the summit was like a share a bit about their presentations. Allen talks about outents and how tools like Dialogflow and Multivocal assist with this concept, while Mark talked about developing a #VoiceFirst prescription system for Alexa.

What does it feel like to talk with a spreadsheet? That's the core question behind Vodo Drive (pronounced like "to-do"), one of Allen's big projects for the Google Assistant. After a demo, Allen and Mark discuss how Vodo Drive works, what it teaches us about building large #VoiceFirst software projects, and what the future holds as Vodo Drive needs to move to Amazon Alexa. Learn more about Vodo Dr...

How do you learn new skills in the #VoiceFirst arena? How do you share what you've learned with others? A week before the Voice Summit, Mark and Allen share their experiences as authors, documenters, podcasters, and public speakers.

No matter if you're building an app for the iPhone or Android, a Google Action, or an Amazon Alexa Skill, there are guidelines that you need to follow to make sure your app is approved by the review team. Mark and Allen go over morerules that you should read before you start to develop your #VoiceFirst skill. Check out the guidelines for Alexa: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/custom-...

No matter if you're building an app for the iPhone or Android, a Google Action, or an Amazon Alexa Skill, there are guidelines that you need to follow to make sure your app is approved by the review team. Mark and Allen go over some of the rules that you should read before you start to develop your #VoiceFirst skill. Check out the guidelines for Alexa: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa...

If you're building your own #VoiceFirst app outside the assistants, you'll also need to think about how you get input from people. Fortunately, there are a number of tools available from AWS and Google Cloud (and others) that will help you do this. Mark and Allen go over the raw technologies involved in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding / Processing (NLU / NLP),...

Not every assistant needs to be part of Amazon Alexa or the Google Assistant. What if you're developing your own voice assistant? How do you take care of some tasks like getting output to your users? In this episode, Allen and Mark give an overview of some of the technologies available to you to send audio exactly the way you want it to sound and some of the tools that are available to use. Resour...

Mark's been on a roll recently, converting many of the utilities he's built as part of writing Amazon Alexa Skills and Google Assistant Actions into open source plugins for Jovo. This week, Mark and Allen discuss why these kinds of libraries are important, review Mark's latest plugin to generate random player names, and uses this as an example for how to build a plugin for Jovo.

Making sure our #VoiceFirst applications are written securely and use secure components is important. And when one of those components has a security bug, it is important that we update it as soon as we can. Mark highlights a recent security vulnerability in the node-forge module, which is used by the alexa-verifier-middleware module. Mark and Allen then discuss what the verifier does and how we c...

Allen and Mark chat about the Amazon Alexa Skills Challenge: Aging & Engaging event that is currently in progress that offers cash prizes to developers for creating #VoiceFirst skills that are targeted to the over 55 crowd. Mark is a judge, so has to be a little reserved in what he says, but there's lots of discussion about tools that teams can use to participate and tips for creating skills t...

Guest Host Craig Walls joins Allen to discuss his latest book on #VoiceFirst development for Amazon Alexa, Build Talking Apps for Alexa , as well as what went into his skill to help Disney Theme Park explorers - Mouse Guests.

Mark goes over the latest open source package that he's developed with his company, RAIN, for the #VoiceFirst community. This allows developers to build a CMS system using Sanity that provides content through Jovo. Allen and Mark discuss why these sorts of systems are important, how they improve Voice-based systems, and some future improvements to improve performance. Links: https://www.jovo.tech/...

Last week, Amazon Alexa ran their annual developer event, Alexa Live, where they showcased a number of new #VoiceFirst features for Alexa. Mark and Allen take a look at the list of announcements for Skill developers and give some first thoughts on what they mean.  Links: Feature Roundup: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/blogs/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/2022/07/Alexa-live-feature-roundup-july-20...

It's our Second Anniversary show! In addition to a few kind words from our friends, Mark and Allen celebrate by sharing what goes on behind the scenes when creating an episode. How do we come up with #VoiceFirst topics? What is our recording setup like? How do we make transcriptions? Why does Allen always wear a blue shirt? How do you get an episode out every week? Thank you, everyone, for your qu...

Open Source components can be incredibly useful when building your #VoiceFirst Skill or app. Allen asks Mark about his latest Open Source project, Badgerific, which is aimed at rewarding users tokens or badges under certain, specific, conditions. Badgerific: https://github.com/rmtuckerphx/badgerific

Based on a question from StackOverflow, Allen and Mark explore the question about how to handle a #VoiceFirst scenario where the user needs to provide a list of several items one at a time (a food order, for example). If we're expecting the user to fill in a slot multiple times, or trigger an intent multiple times, before saying they're ready to move on - how do we make sure this intent gets handl...