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Those of us building Voice Apps for Alexa and Google Assistant have naturally become evangelists and power users of the voice assistants and smart speakers. Case in point, I don't know anybody who knows more about How To Use Alexa than creator of Project Voice and CEO of Score Publishing, Bradley Metrock. Bradley is the author of More Than Just Weather and Music - 200 ways to use Alexa. He is also the host of "This Week In Voice" Podcast. In this interview with our friend QuHarrison Terry of Inevitable/Human and Mark Cuban Companies, We talk about his affinity for Voice, Alexa, and why he chose Chattanooga, Tennessee to be the home for the number one event for Voice and AI in America. Q and I joke about Bradley wanting to marry Alexa, but the truth is he's an amazing leader in the voice space and his passion for voice continues to pave the way for millions of people to benefit from voice as a technology. Q also asks me about my top Voice Predictions/Trends in 2020 and Bradley elaborates on Voice Branding.

The same way that our lives all improved as consumers and eventually as marketers and business owners in 2008-2010 with the advent of the iPhone and other smartphones, 2020 will be the year and certainly mark the beginning of the decade in which all of our lives improved due to Voice technology, like Alexa, Google Assistant and even Samsung Bixby and custom voice assistants. 15 years ago none of us knew what “pinching and zooming” or “swiping” meant. Now, our children are asking Alexa, Google and Siri just about everything. Students are building Alexa Skills for class projects and instructional technology directors are encouraging teachers to incorporate Alexa in the classroom. In this video, my friend QuHarrison Terry of Inevitable/Human and Mark Cuban Companies asks me: “What’s Keeping Me Up In Voice?” My answer: I get excited about the every day business owner and entrepreneur that maybe doesn’t have a huge team. They can use voice to become more efficient and effective. They can use voice to check their Quickbooks or have a voice based version of their company training. If you’re a small company with less than 10 people, you may not have a full HR team to train your next hire. You can use voice for that. Q also asks me: What’s the difference between a Voice App and a Voice Skill? So I happily break that down. Finally, Q tees up my take on what the best tools are to create your own Voice Apps (Alexa Skills and Google Actions). 1. Voiceflow – An authoring platform to create your own custom voice apps without coding. Content managers / digital strategists (non-coders) can easily build Voice apps in minutes and deploy to Alexa and Google Assistant. Voiceflow has several “blocks” that allow for advanced functionality such as replacing the robot voice, building visual screens for Echo Show devices via Alexa Presentation Language (APL). It also allows for team collaboration between content strategists and coders. Developers can layer API blocks and code blocks to extend the Voice App’s functionality beyond just a conversation. 2. The Voice Designer – I’m partial to this tool, because my CTO Joe Wallace and I built it for Data Driven Design clients. The Voice Designer is a one-of-a-kind WordPress plug-in that places an authoring tool in the backend of any WordPress website. The Voice Designer is similar to Voiceflow, but not as feature-heavy. It’s meant for marketing directors and small business owners to be able to build a voice-based version of their company website or blog and deploy it directly to Alexa and Google Assistant from the backend of their WordPress website. It is really meant to meet the marketer where they already are – their WordPress admin panel. 3. Engage By Voice – Engage is a phenomenal tool that features templates that can be customized to build and deploy custom voice apps for your business. Engage features templates that allow businesses to gather phone numbers and send text messages, deploy surveys, gather reviews and much more. Engage is a perfect tool for marketers to try voice and see how Alexa Skills and Google Actions can integrate into and support all of their other business development efforts. For more information on any of these tools, please feel free to contact me directly at paul@datadriven.design. I look forward to helping you build your voice apps! This interview took place at Project Voice – the number one event for Voice Tech and AI in America – from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Thanks to Bradley Metrock of Score Publishing and VoiceFirst.FM Thanks for reading, watching and listening, and have a great day!

I recently asked my good friend QuHarrison Terry, head of growth marketing at Mark Cuban Companies, and co-founder of the amazing content creation company Inevitable/Human, what he thought I could do to improve my overall content strategy.   Being familiar with my love for being a practitioner in the technology space, and teaching my audience everything I know and learn related to digital marketing, web design and software, Q made a great point: "tell more of your story," he said.  "Tell your audience more what it's like to live in Valencia, Spain and run a small U.S. based digital agency."  This is tricky for me, because like most content creators, I don't necessarily like to get super personal. I'd rather stick to my "how to tips."  But Q is right. To truly engage my audience, I need to be more vulnerable and open up more.  The reality is, I have the same fears about creating content that everyone else has. Will my audience care? Will they like it? Will they relate to it? Will I come across the wrong way?  Since Q is pretty much a genius content marketer, and I spent the week with him at Project Voice, I decided to take advantage of the fact we had his crew with us. I asked if we could sit down and talk on camera, so I could practice telling my story a bit, rather than only focusing on how-to tips.  This conversation is what resulted. I had a chance to talk about my strategy of going super micro, and providing value to clients by being practical and tactical rather than big picture dreamy.  Opening up to Q made me take a deep look at why I do what I do, and why I do it the way I do it.  I talk about how I deal with emerging tech, the importance of doing what you said you were going to do, instant gratification, how I got around not wanting to party as a teenager but still make friends and be social, and why and how I moved to Valencia, Spain and run my company from there with 6 teammates and nearly 100 clients in the U.S.  This is a special interview to me, and I hope you enjoy it. Thanks to Q. Hopefully is the first of many with him.

I'm a big fan of time saving tips. The Google Site Kit WordPress Plug-in is a huge time saver.  It's purpose is to connect four main Google Digital Strategy Tools that we always use for ourselves and our clients:  1. Google Search Console 2. Google Analytics 3. Google Page Speed Insights 4. Google Adsense  What I like most about it is that once it's all set up and running, instead of having to log into all four platforms to get your data, you just log into the backend of your WordPress website, which you should be doing daily anyway to add/update content!  This video shows you how to get Google Site Kit all set up on your WordPress website, connect your data, and become more efficient and effective with your digital marketing!  What Google Site Kit needs to add next is Google My Business Integration. :)

When clients ask me if we support business Email hosting and management, my answer is - "yes, but only GSuite," nothing else. This is because it is so simple, efficient, effective and user friendly to host your business emails through Gmail.  In fact, it's so easy, that I decided I wanted to show all of you how to do it yourself!

I'm usually trying to figure out how to push the boundaries of all social media platforms. On Instagram, for example, I want to know what the best way is to gain legit followers. The same goes for Twitter.  In the process of following new people on Twitter, I got a little excited about learning about Voice, and started to rapidly follow people in the Voice Community to try and connect with them.  Not trying to be a "follow me - follow you" (and I'm not talking about the old Genesis song) type of marketer, but rather to gain access and knowledge to the community quickly, as they're all on Twitter.  Twitter is a great tool for growing awareness and gaining real champions for the Nashville Voice Conference, and I've even picked up a few clients on Twitter lately for WordPress Design and Development services.  I digress. In the process of pushing the "I'm going to follow as many people as I can today on Twitter" boundaries, I found out about the Technical Follower Limits on Twitter, and I think they make a ton of sense.  This video explains what you'll run into on Twitter these days while trying to take part in community discussion.

Google Analytics can be an amazing Business Intelligence Dashboard, if you set it up properly.   While setting it up to track eCommerce Conversions is one thing, which I've shown you here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wgJJAV3BP4&feature=emb_title - setting it up to track leads - and assign a monetary value to those leads, is another.  For example, let's say each time your business gets a new lead from your website, you're 10% likely to close the sale. If the average sale is $50,000, this lead might be worth $5k to your business.  Assigning a value to a lead is easy, and I show you how to do it in this video.  When you assign a value to a goal completion, you can easily attribute it back to a referral source.  For example, let's say you've run $1k in Facebook Ads in the last month. You'd want to know how much value in leads you've generated from that ad. This tip shows you how to get that all set up to use Google Analytics as a Business Intelligence Dashboard for your website.

I was talking recently with a good friend of mine, QuHarrison Terry, who is the co-founder of Inevitable/Human and the head of growth marketing at Mark Cuban Companies. He was asking me about why I thought the Alexa Skills Store would be the next $46 billion App Store. My answer, that Amazon does an amazing job incentivizing developers to build Alexa Skills - full-fledged voice-based applications, vs. Apple not really opening the door to developers to build full voice apps on top of Siri, sparked Q to ask me my take on Siri Shortcuts. As of this filming/writing, Siri Shortcuts are TOTALLY DIFFERENT than Alexa Skills. This video explains further.

One question I've been asked very often since the first ever Nashville Voice Conference on July 31, 2019 is - how do I reserve my voice app's opening phrase on Google? The technical way to ask this would be "how do I create an opening invocation on Google Actions?" But that's not exactly what these people are asking. They're business owners, so they're semi-interested in getting their brand name as an opening invocation, but rather far more interested in reserving a valuable keyword as their opening invocation. This is something that business owners see as a "voice domain name" on Google Assistant. Makes sense when you think about it. If I can have my Google Action start when someone says "Hey Google, let's talk digital marketing" I can in theory drive more brand awareness for Data Driven Design by "dominating" this phrase in voice search. This is called "Google Action Whitelabeling" and this video shows you how to do it.

I love Alexa for Business. You just need an AWS account to deploy Private Alexa Skills to employees of your organization. You can also use it to manage company-owned devices and which company private skills can be used on personal employee devices.  What you'll need:  1. An Alexa Skill built and ready to deploy for your organization/employees/specific private group. Note: this can be for a private podcast, piece of content or experience between a group of people. It doesn't have to be limited to businesses. But it's GREAT for businesses, which is why it's called Alexa for Business.  2. An AWS Account.  We'll use the Alexa Blueprint Console as the example for this piece of content but the same thing can be accomplished when building an Alexa Skill from the Alexa Developer Console ASK (kit).  Here are the steps:  1. Go to the Blueprints Console to Skills You've Made - blueprints.amazon.com/skills  2. Click "Manage Access" under your Alexa For Business skill.  3. In a separate browser tab, open your AWS account (it doesn't need to be the same username/password as your Alexa account, but it can be). Under the Services dropdown, find Alexa For Business and click on it. Enable it.  4. On the left hand side menu, click "Skills"  5. On the Skills screen, click the Private Skills tab, and click "Show IAM ARN" number  6. Copy the full alpha-numeric number and paste it back into the Manage My Access section into the tab with your Blueprint Skill in it.  7. Click Add and Finish, and you'll get a confirmation message.  8. Refresh your other browser tab with your AWS account, and you'll see your Private Skill under the Private Skills tab.  9. You should see your Skill and the Status should say "Waiting on Review." Click Review.  10. Add the Skill to a Skill Group. Go to the Skills tab on the left hand menu of AWS, and under the Enabled Skills tab, check the box on the left. This will make the "Add to skill group" button orange and clickable.  11. Create a Skill Group by finding "Skill groups" on the left hand side menu under "Configuration."   12. Find orange "Create skill group" button and click it.  13. Name it, give it a description and click "Create."  14. Invite Users. Configure the details of you user invitation by clicking the User Invitation Page link in the lefthand side menu.  15. Add a contact name and email from your organization and customize your welcome message.  16. Click "Users" on the lefthand side menu. Put in First Name, Last Name and Email address and click "Send invite."  17. Click on User Invitations under "Settings" on lefthand side menu to check status of users accepting their invite.  Statuses include "Invited" and "Enrolled."   Enrolled means they've enabled the skill.