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 and there is a YouTube version with the full short film on Voicebot's YouTube channel.  Martinoli reveals his process, the tools he used, and the fact that it only took about four hours to create.  Jean-Baptiste is currently with Nextiva and is the former CTO and co-founder of Exo U., Mioplanent and KanariWorld. Early in his career, Martinoli was a software developer at Lotus, which was later acquired by IBM.

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.  Sudhakar is a former senior VP and GM at ServiceNow, Splunk, VMWare, and Pivotal. He was CEO at Caspida when the company was acquired by Splunk, where he assumed leadership for machine learning, AI, and analytics-based solutions. Sudhakar was also the CEO and founder of the big data startup Cetas, which was acquired by VMWare, and founded Sanera systems which was acquired by Brocade/McData. He began his career as an engineer at IBM and SGI and earned his PhD in computer science from UCLA.     

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)   - Brandon Kaplan, Skilled Creative (9:35)   - Corey Hill, Veritone (14:21)   - Maddie Apple, Women in Voice (18:39)   - Ian Utile, Attention Live (23:35)   - Tim Kahle and Dominik Meissner, 169 Labs (33:08)   Topics range from the conversation design for the contact center and an integration layer for voice AI solutions to use cases in Europe and a new sporting event product that employs synthetic announcers and in-game data.

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) - Susan Westwater, Vixen Labs (33:08) - Pete Erickson, Modev / Voice Summit (36:58) Topics range from the use cases driving the most conversational AI demand today and best practices for voice strategy to whether there is a voice winter underway.   

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 generators. She launched a collection of 501 pieces earlier this year called AI spaceships, which she made into NFTs, and they sold out in an hour. That collaboration was with Night Cafe. Since then, she has launched a new art show which includes a variety of artwork using OpenAI's DALL-E and Midjourney, which are other prominent text-to-image generators.  Anne offers a perspective on the rise of synthetic media and how it is being received and used in the art world. She also shares some pro tips on how to use the new tools.  This interview was conducted at the Synthedia synthetic media conference hosted by Voicebot in September.  

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 accelerated need for automation and often it requires a digital brain to determine what types of digital services and interactions will best serve a custom. Enter autonomous digital people.  Greg's talk can also be viewed in Voicebot's YouTube channel where you will see as well as hear the digital humans. However, the presentation and the conversation with host Bret Kinsella are also well-suited to listening.  If you want to know what 2025 looks like, you can see it all around you right now. 

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 highlights key words such as medications and procedures and provides click-through definitions.  For doctors, the transcripts are packaged as physician notes which they can review and then automatically upload into the electronic medical record (EMR). Other solutions in the space focus on helping physicians get the right data into the right fields in the EMR. Abridge is focused on the rich data in the conversation beyond the required information.  Rao was formerly a senior executive at UPMC Enterprises and serves as faculty and a working cardiologist at the Heart and Vascular Institute at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He earned his MD from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.  

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 developers easy access to high performing AI models without having to set up a hosting environment or train them. 

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 annually. Gupta and his co-founder created Evabot to make that process easy, efficient, and better matched with what the gift recipients actually like.

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 been on the podcast in three years, and Sleep Jar is one of the most successful Alexa skills and voice-first user experiences developed by a third party. We get into monetization, growth, working with the platforms, and sometimes no longer working with them. Nick Schwab began building Alexa skills in 2016 and founded Sleep Jar in 2017. Prior to committing to Sleep Jar full time in 2021, he was a senior software engineer at Livio, a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. He is also an Alexa champion.