The Voicebot Podcast

Today's episode breaks down some of the key findings from the Voice Shopping Consumer Adoption Report for 2021. Data presented goes back to 2018 and shows a rising trend in adoption. Learn about total users, total consumer interest, product categories, average voice shopping order size, demographic data around users and much more.  This episode features Bret Kinsella breaking down the data and discussing the implications for the voice and retail industries. There is a companion to this episode release on YouTube where you can view the charts referenced in the show. 

This is the U.S. edition and the Consumer edition of our two-part year in review episodes. We discuss the industry globally from a U.S. perspective with three guests that include: Chithra Durgam - Founder Blue Check Skill which helps bring celebrities and brands onto Amazon Alexa and also is a practicing dentist. Todd Mozer - CEO of Sensory, a company he founded in 1994. The company has been adding voice AI features to consumer products for over 25 years and can be found in billions of devices. Eric Schwartz - Head Writer Voicebot.ai and the author of many of the stories we discuss today. 

This week we discuss voice year in review for 2021. All of the guests in this episode are based in Europe but operate globally so you will get both perspectives. Also, the conversation is heavily skewed toward enterprise voice applications because that drove so much of the important news in 2021. We start with an in-depth discussion of acquisitions and funding which were bigger in 2021 than in any previous year. Guests include: - Otto Soderlund is CEO and co-founder of Speechly which is pioneering a new full-duplex and super-fast voice interface for the web and mobile. - Dominik Meissner is a co-founder of 169 labs. The company has worked with Sony, Ikea, Lotto, Mercedes Benz, MINI, and Diageo. - Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald is the creator of Open Voice, one of the most popular newsletters in the industry, and founder of the Project Zilver consortium which seeks to make the lives of elder adults better through the use of voice assistants.

Jon Stine is the Executive Director and founder of the Open Voice Network. Prior to founding OVN, Stine was global director of retail sales at Intel and a director of North American retail at Cisco. He has an MS in telecommunications from the University of Oregon. Today we talk about voice assistant interoperability, standards, and keeping AI systems open and consumer-friendly. 

Raghu Ravinutala co-founded Yellow.ai in 2015 to solve a problem he personally had encountered, poor customer support experiences. A former IC chip designer, Raghu was drawn by the idea that conversational AI combined with back-end systems integration could fully automate a wide array of customer problems nearly instantly without needing to wait on hold for support reps. In 2016, the company was accepted to the Microsoft Accelerator and the company counts over 750 enterprise clients globally. Prior to Yellow, Raghu was a Senior Manager for integrated circuit design engineering at Broadcom, VP of product management at Teleradtech, and a senior IC designer at Texas Instruments. In today's interview, Raghu talks about the origin of Yellow.ai, how the company grew rapidly by supporting WhatsApp integration, how messaging is so much different as a channel than a chatbot on a website, what the enterprise really needs in conversational AI, the myth around the superiority of human customer service agents, what are Moments of Trust in the customer relationship, and the need for Dynamic AI Agents that support every customer channel. It's a wide-ranging discussion that illuminates several news ideas in conversational AI.

Vinay Shukla is CEO and co-founder of ConverseNow and the former founder and President of Endeavour Software. Endeavour was acquired by Genpact in 2016 where Vinay served as vice president of digital for two years before founding ConverseNow. Today we discuss ConverseNow's original focus, its pivot to serving restaurants in late 2019, and how the pandemic has transformed that industry. We also discuss how the company went from serving zero to over 1000 restaurants in less than two years.  Earlier in his career, Vinay was an assistant vice president of technology at Barclays and a solutions architect at UBS.

Roger Kibbe is Senior Developer Evangelist at Viv Labs which is the home of Bixby in Samsung Research Americas. Today, we discuss the evolution of Bixby and voice assistants over the past five years. In particular, we break down the new Bixby Home features and the rise of AI in smart home features. We also go into depth around the importance of command and control voice interactions.  Prior to Samsung, Kibbe founded Voice Craft, a voice app development firm which was preceded by 12 year at Gap Inc. where he oversaw customer experience and logistics technology strategy. He also worked at Accenture early in his career. 

Shawn Wilkie is CEO of Talkatoo. A cross-platform speech-to-text solution for Veterinarians. It streamlines patient data input and works across multiple platforms.   He founded the company in 2019 with the first product arriving late in the year. The onset of the pandemic led to rapid acceleration of vet adoption which continues through today and helped to secure a new funding round in September.  Wilkie is also the host of the Veterinary Innovation Podcast which began in 2019.   Prior to Talkatoo he was CEO of Robotnik and founder of Sheepdog.

Elena Parlatore is the senior director of global digital consumer experience at Pepsico. Her role in the consumer insights group focuses on all of the ways consumers interact with Pepsico products and channels. A big part of that work is focused on consumer interaction with conversational AI technologies through Amazon Alexa, Facebook Messenger, website chatbots, and the call center.  Today, we discuss the objectives, technologies, channels, and the results of Pepsico's many conversational AI initiatives. It is a rare look inside the way that large consumer goods enterprises approach conversational AI.  

Rob Carpenter founded Valyant in 2017 with a specific focus on developing a voice assistant drive-through solution for fast food restaurants. While Carpenter insists Valyant is building a platform that can support other use cases in the future, he also is clearly focused on mastering the drive-through use case and goes into depth about the hardware, software, and workflow Valyant has built. We discuss the key technical and business process challenges that Valyant had to overcome and what their customers set as key solution requirements. In addition, Carpenter breaks down Valyant's tech stack and the competitive environment.