The Voicebot Podcast

Val Jones joined Storyfile as CTO in January 2021 after a leadership role at Raxium and 16 years at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. The institute has been at the forefront of synthetic media research and innovation for more than a decade.  Storyfile has products that might be thought of by some as virtual humans or digital twins, but the company characterizes its solution as conversational video. After capturing robust video recordings of people discussing a particular set of topics, Storyfile creates an interactive lifelike avatar that you can talk to through a website, app, or kiosk. The most famous Storyfile user is the actor William Shatner though the project first gained widespread attention by capturing the experiences of holocaust survivors.  Today, the technology is used for everything from entertainment, training, and answering product questions to preserving the memories of loved ones before they pass away. Jones discusses the use cases, technology evolution, and trade-offs in this rapidly growing market segment.  Jones earned PhD, master's, and undergraduate degrees in computer science from USC. 

Mark Fosdike co-founded Datch in 2017 after spending several years as an aircraft systems design engineer at CAV aerospace. His co-founder also had experience in industrial manufacturing at Siemens and Transpower. Both are engineers, so they had a keen sense of the challenges of getting access to information and entering data while working with heavy equipment in industrial manufacturing.   Mark breaks down the key use cases, the tech stack for Datch, training the voice assistant, and much more in today's conversation. Custom voice assistants can do more than just play music and tell you the weather.

Paul Cutsinger is the director of Nvidia Omniverse Exchange, a platform for building simulation and metaverse environments. He discusses how companies are using Omniverse to simulate operations to improve efficiency and reduce operational risk, in addition to capabilities around metaverse and virtual human development. Prior to Nvidia, Paul ran developer education and evangelism programs for Amazon Alexa, worked on the Amazon App store, in gaming at Disney, and with browsers at Microsoft. He will be a featured speaker at Synthedia, the synthetic media conference, in September 2022. Synthedia is online and free to attend. Register here: https://bit.ly/synthedia-rising

Charles Cadbury breaks down how voice assistants can be used to drive awareness and sales for consumer brands. Say It Now was founded in 2018 and won the European Alexa Cup in 2019. The company made headlines during the COVID-19 pandemic when it rolled out a solution to help raise funds for charities through smart speakers. Learnings from that initiative led to the development of Say It Now's Actionable Audio Ads which drive user interaction with branded Alexa skills. Cadbury breaks down the effectiveness of integrating consumer touchpoints through smart speakers, radio, and marketing campaigns to drive conversions. He also discusses recent neurological research on how consumers respond to these campaigns.  

John Goscha founded Native Voice in 2020 to enable any custom voice assistant to become a first-class citizen on any device. That means it is not behind another voice assistant or buried in an app. It can instead be activated directly from any device by its branded wake word.    We talk about why this is important to brands looking to deepen their relationship with customers and make access to their services more convenient. And, we talk about the Native Voice tech stack and what it takes to enable multiple, simultaneously available voice assistants. There is also a discussion about Native Voice's big announcement with Amazon and Skull Candy at Alexa Live.

Evan MacMillan started Gridspace 10 years ago to tackle a tough problem faced by contact centers: analyzing their conversational data. It's an application that stands apart from most conversational AI solutions with its focus on conversational intelligence as opposed to self-service.    Before co-founding Gridspace, MacMillan was a co-founder at Zappedy, which was acquired by Groupon during the heyday of online deals communities. He earned a degree in product design from Stanford.

The Amazon Alexa Live event for 2022 introduced a couple of dozen new features for developers, new revenue-sharing agreements, and is ushering in a new era of simultaneous voice assistants.  The Two Voice Devs, Allen Firstenberg (Google Assistant GDE) and Mark Tucker (Alexa Champion), along with Voicebot's Eric Schwartz and Bret Kinsella break down the announcements and sort through the type of impacts we can expect. 

David Liu, CEO of Sonde Health and a seasoned leader in health tech, talks about the innovative use of vocal biomarkers for patient health assessment. He explains how these markers aid in early detection of issues like respiratory and mental health conditions. Liu discusses the partnership between healthcare providers and consumer brands to enhance health monitoring. He also reveals surprising markets adopting this technology and the integration of voice analysis in proactive healthcare strategies.

Timo Kunz has a PhD in operations research and spent more than a decade as a data scientist and analyst before founding Aflorithmic Labs in 2019. The company's first product, API.audio, is a developer toolset for quickly adding synthetic voice audio combined with other features such as music and effects. It is promoted as the first audio-as-a-service solution for developers that enables control of key audio characteristics without the need for separate post-production audio engineering. Key use cases are in advertising, marketing, and media. 

Voice assistants are broadly adopted by consumers and for several consumer facing activities such as customer support. Kim Conti, vice president of product, and Chen Zhang, chief technology officer of RAIN Agency share their experience building custom voice assistants for enterprise processes and products in general and more recently for deskless workers. They also share the details behind their beta version custom voice assistant for auto mechanics which is expected to be generally available later this year.  Conti has held product leadership roles at Travelers while Zhang was on the NLP software engineering team at Apple for the Chinese version of Siri and was later engineering director of AI speech and NLP for Midea.