VUX World

Voice search is growing. As smart speaker adoption increases and people use the voice assistants on their phones more and more, voice is playing an increasing role in more customer journeys. But what's your share of voice? How often does your company 'rank' for the search terms you'd like to rank for? Amazon and Google are tight-lipped about voice search volumes and don't offer any way of tracking...

What is speech recognition and how does it work? Automatics speech recognition (also known as ASR) is a suite of technology that takes audio signals containing speech, analysis it and converts it into text so that it can be read and understood by humans and machines. It's the technology that makes voice assistants like Amazon Alexa able to understand what a user says. There's obviously a whol...

Voice shopping on Alexa and Google Assistant smart speakers is a $2bn market today, and is forecast to explode. I've wrote about the  potential of voice shopping  for the Harvard Business Review last year, but things are starting to pick up. According Amazon's Patrick Gauthier , 20% of Americans are ready for voice shopping now, and 39% of  all Americans  will complete some par...

Corona virus hits voice as Google removes coronavirus actions, Spotify looks like it's releasing a voice assistant and Jovo lets you build voice assistants everywhere. Presented by Sparks Sparks is a new podcast player app that lets you learn and retain knowledge while you listen. The Sparks team are looking for people just like you: podcast listeners who're also innovative early adopters of new t...

The Food Network aims to the be Peloton of cooking with live video broadcasting on Alexa. Director of Technology and Emerging Platforms at Discovery Inc., Tim McElreath, joins us to share how. Presented by Sparks Sparks is a new podcast player app that lets you learn and retain knowledge while you listen. The Sparks team are looking for people just like you: podcast listeners who're also inno...

Jon Bloom, Senior Conversation Designer at Google, joins us to share what a conversation designer does at Google, as well as some conversation design techniques used at Google, such as 'grounding strategies'.  Presented by Sparks Sparks is a new podcast player app that lets you learn and retain knowledge while you listen. The Sparks team are looking for people just like you: podcast listeners...

Maaike Coppens returns to share how you can go from zero to hero in one voice design sprint. From nothing at the beginning to a a validated use case and prototype at the end, with fun in the middle.  Presented by Readspeaker Readspeaker  is a pioneering voice technology company that provides lifelike Text to Speech (TTS) services. Whether you're needing a TTS voice for your IVR system, v...

VaynerMedia are one of the leading global digital agencies. Director of Innovation at VaynerSmart, Claire Mitchell, joins us to share how VaynerMedia approach voice, as well as sharing some insights on situational design and sound design. Listen on: Apple podcasts  |  Spotify  |  YouTube  |  Overcast  |  CastBox  |  Spreaker  |  TuneIn &n...

Ben McCulloch shares his take on why intonation and emotion is imperative in creating high quality and trust-building voice experiences. Presented by Readspeaker Readspeaker  is a pioneering voice technology company that provides lifelike Text to Speech (TTS) services. Whether you're needing a TTS voice for your IVR system, voice application, automobile, robot, public service announcement sys...

We catch up with 4 Amazon Alexa Champions to discuss the then, now and future of the Alexa skills ecosystem and the voice first community. Presented by Readspeaker Readspeaker  is a pioneering voice technology company that provides lifelike Text to Speech (TTS) services. Whether you're needing a TTS voice for your IVR system, voice application, automobile, robot, public service announcement s...

Twilio is a magical tool, and Autopilot is its NLU platform that voice devs and designers need to check out. In this episode we're taking a look at what Autopilot is, what are its core concepts, and how it differs from other NLU services. To get $10 free, use our referral link at www.twilio.com/referral/ZQRq9v Music featured in this episode: Blossoming by Sound of Music Logjam by Sound of Music Sa...

Adva Levin joins us to share why you should design personas for your voice apps, how you can create them, as well as how to work with voice acting talent. Presented by Readspeaker Readspeaker  is a pioneering voice technology company that provides lifelike Text to Speech (TTS) services. Whether you're needing a TTS voice for your IVR system, voice application, automobile, robot, public servic...

Sarah Andrew Wilson, Chief Content Officer at Matchbox.io, shares the secret sauce for creating the kind of Alexa skills you can build a business on. In this episode: This week, we speak to Sarah about the Matchbox.io stable of skills and discuss: What it’s like maintaining 18 Alexa skills The Opearlo acquisition Unique advice for people and companies just getting started The 3-step Matchbox.io ph...

The first episode of the new year is both a reflection on how far we've come in the last 12 months, and what to look forward to in the year to come.  This is a special episode as it's the first of a new decade. And in this episode of the rundown, we're getting deep.    Biggest news stories of 2019: Apple acquires Pullstring  - Was this an acqui-hire? Or is Apple using the Pulls...

How do NPR approach designing voice applications? And how do they engage users to make sure that they're designing the right things for the right people, Ha-Hoa Homano, Sr. Product Manager, Emerging Platforms at NPR joins us to share all. Links Read more at npr.design Learn with npr.codes Follow Ha-Hoa on Twitter Audio player functionality suggestion on Alexa.uservoice.com (still pending) Hosted o...

Sierra Fontana and Carissa Merrill are working hard to make the US Bank's voice services accessible to all. They join us on this episode to share how they're approaching accessibility for voice and why it's so important to prioritise accessibility early. Presented by the Conversational Academy.  Save 10% on the world's no.1 online conversation design course . Links WCAG guidelines All about V...

Facilitating a panel discussion on voice design with Ben Sauer of Babylon Health, Charlie Cadbury of Say it Now, Jen Heap of Vixen Labs, Rozzi Meredith of Voxly and Quirine van Walt Meijer of Microsoft. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Greenwood is the CEO of the human tech agency, Greenwood Campbell . Last year, Adam and his team trialled placing voice assistants in residential homes in the UK to see whether voice assistants can help alleviate loneliness for senior citizens. We discuss the project and the results, as well as get Adam's take on the current state of voice and what he'd like to see in 2020. Presented by the C...

Taken from Kane's talk at the Bots, AI and Voice meet-up in London on 20 November 2019. The meet-up was ran by Roy Murphy of Synthetic . Check out the meet-up page for info on the next meet-up. Connect with me on LinkedIn to watch all future talks live, including the panel discussion on voice design at MUXL2019 . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is a bonus episode looking at this week's discussions on LinkedIn. We complain about discoverability and retention, but who's actually doing anything about it? Are you putting the budget required behind getting your apps used and are you utilising the tools available to you to retain users? More importantly, are you creating the right thing for the right person in the first place? Joi...

Is discoverability of Alexa skills, Google Assistant actions and other voice applications the duty of the platforms i.e. Amazon and Google, or is it the duty of the brand or developer creating them? We discuss this, as well as discoverability challenges within voice applications with Voiceflow co-founder, Braden Ream. Links Save 10% on the Conversational Academy online conversation design course T...

Jeff Adams was the founding manager of the Alexa speech group; the team that made Alexa listen and talk. Jeff joins us to share the origin story of Alexa: where it come from and how it was created, and why the device was called 'Echo'. Jeff also explains the details behind the three core parts of speech recognition: lexicons, acoustic modelling and language modelling, how the Doppler became the Ec...

Kane hosted the MUXL: Voice innovation 2019 Meetup on October 24th 2019 at Amazon HQ, and this is the opening talk. It covers the most recent smart speaker adoption rates for the UK, debates the 'voice first winter' and shares some recent behavioural trends from Code Computer Love. Links Gartner AI hype cycle, July 2019 UK Smart speaker adoption stats from Voicebot.ai Chinese smart speaker adoptio...

Communicating address information to voice assistants is hard. Josh Wigmore, Head of Product, joins us to share how What 3 Words are making this possible. Win a ticket to All About Voice 2019 All About Voice is the biggest and best voice conference in Europe. It's in Muchich on October 11th and feature talks from Amazon, Google and plenty more. Plus, yours truly is hosting the event. Win a free ti...

Proposing a new term for the voice first industry to consider: VTA - Voice-to-Action. It's the same as a call to action, only it's exclusive to voice first platforms and interfaces and relies on the call to action and the response being given and responded to on the voice first interface. In this video, we walk through a definition of VTA, as well as provide some examples of where Voice-to-Action...