The Voicebot Podcast

Edward Saatchi is the founder of Fable Studio which is bringing AR and VR characters to life for the metaverse. Fable is creating both characters and a world where you can interact with them, but more interestingly, where these virtual beings can learn and evolve. Prior to Fable Studio, Saatchi was the founder of the Emmy Award-winning VR movie studio Oculus Story Studio. Earlier, he was the founder of NationalField which provided social media technology for the Obama for America organization and presidential campaigns. Saatchi has degrees from Sorbonne and Oxford.

Greg Cross is co-founder and chief business officer of Soul Machines, a leader in the creation of virtual humans (aka digital people). We discuss the origin story that goes back to 2012 as a research organization set up at the University of Aukland through the founding of Soul Machines in 2016, how 2020 accelerated the business, and what is happening today. In addition, we delve into the world of digital employees, the integration of voice AI solutions, touch on the metaverse, and review specific use cases by industry.  Greg is the former chairman of SLI Systems, CEO and co-founder of PowerbyProxi, a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and former managing director of Microsoft New Zealand. 

Amazon just announced a custom voice assistant deal with Disney and a bushel full of new products including a smart display you hang on the wall and a home robot. After the event concluded, a few of us gathered in the Voicebot Discord Community to discuss what we saw, our initial reactions, and what it is likely to mean for the industry. Plus, we learn which of the new products the podcast guests are planning to buy and why.  Joining me in the conversation are Sarah Andrew Wilson of Matchbox.io, Allen Firstenberg from Objective Consulting, Tom Hewitson from Labworks.io, Dave Kemp of Oaktree Products. and Andrew Herndon from Voicebot.ai. 

Hannes Heikinheimo co-founded Speechly in 2016 with the vision to create a low-latency, real-time streaming speech recognition API. Today, Speechly offers an API that it says is the fastest voice UI for the web and other platforms. Prior to Speechly, he was a data science partner at Reaktor, a language engineer working on Siri for Apple, the analytics lead at game-maker Rovio, a Senior Data Scientist at Nokia, and a machine learning researcher at Helsinki University of Technology where he earned his PhD.

Daniel Kornev is chief product officer for DeepPavlov.ai which is the developer behind the open source framework for building voice assistants. The company has raised over $9 million in funding and has over 50,000 downloads and 5000 Stars on GitHub.  In addition, Kornev served as an advisor to the Alexa Prize team from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Before DeepPavlov, Daniel Kornev spent two years working as a consultant and interim executive with a variety of conversational AI startups. He also was a Senior Product Manager at Yandex where he worked on some of the core feature sets for the Alice voice assistant. Earlier, he was a technical program manager at Google and a program manager and dev evangelist at Microsoft. Daniel Kornev has an M.S. in computer science and has done extensive research in human-computer interaction.

Andy Mauro is the CEO of Automat which he co-founded in 2016. Its solution creates personalized shopping experiences for eCommerce that learns the needs of customers through a conversational interaction that then returns better product recommendations and higher conversion rates. The AI part of the solution starts by ingesting a product catalog and labeling the content to help drive better understanding about how the products fulfill needs beyond categories and specifications. It complements this with a conversational chat interface that can interact with shoppers and surface the appropriate product catalog item based on their needs. Notably, prior to founding Automat, Andy was senior director of Nuance's Innovations Group and the product manager for Nuance's custom voice assistant Nina, launched in 2014. He spent over 15 years at Nuance and witnessed its key growth era firsthand. Andy dissects the custom voice assistant market's origins and status today which is a nice launching point for discussing Automat and the company's strategy around e-commerce.

Jan Sedivy is a Researcher at the Institute of Cybernetics and Robotics at the Czech Technical University (CTU) and a member of the faculty of electrical engineering. This is also his alma mater where he earned a PhD in 1983. Jan served as the faculty leader for Team Alquist from CTU which was the 2021 winner of the Amazon Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge. The SoicalBot Grand Challenge is for university teams to develop conversational bots that can hold a conversation with a user for an average of 20 minutes and receive positive reviews. About a dozen teams are selected each year to compete. The team from the Czech Technical University has been a finalist in all four competitions for the SocialBot Grand Challenge, coming in second twice and third once. This year's competition yielded its first win for the top prize and the $500,000 reward. We discuss the Alexa Prize process, expectations, tools, and technical approaches in today's discussion including how the university teams use the funding that Amazon offers to the semi-finalists. I don't believe there has ever been a conversation revealing this much about the inner workings of the Alexa Prize competition. In addition, we go well beyond this topic with Jan because of his rich history in the industry. After several years as an assistant professor focused on digital signal processing, he moved to IBM where he worked on speech recognition and language interaction for over 15 years. From there, he spent time at Google before returning to academia. He is also an advisor to several companies working on a range of solutions including virtual humans and mental health chatbots.

Voice assistants are used across many devices and in many different contexts. The car is what we characterize as among the big 3 along with smart speakers and smartphones. These are the surfaces that have the largest voice assistant user bases both overall and in terms of active users. The recently published In-Car Voice Assistant Consumer Adoption Report for 2021 is the jumping-off point for today's discussion between Bret Kinsella and Eric Schwartz of Voicebot.ai. This report includes consumer adoption data from the U.S., UK, and Germany and includes consumer trend data going back to 2019. There is also a lot of analysis dedicated to the capabilities and momentum of the key vendors providing voice assistant technology to automakers. In addition, we discuss trends in the news around automaker voice assistant related announcements. Today's discussion is a quick way to get oriented around that state of voice assistant adoption and capabilities in the car. For those of you looking for more details, go to research.voicebot.ai.

Ryan Star is CEO and founder of Stationhead, a social audio app that enables anyone to start their own social, global radio program. He is a recording artist that got his big break playing at CBGBs in New York and then opening for Bon Jovi when he was still in high school. Today, he has more than 40 million plays on Spotify and around 200,000 monthly listeners. Ryan has worked in entertainment long enough to understand where there are gaps for creators, particularly those that haven't hit it big yet. That led him to create Stationhead in 2017. Some Stationhead show DJs have had over 200,000 concurrent listeners on their shows and successful monetization. It is a different angle on social audio and an innovative model. 

Ryan Steelberg is President of Veritone. He co-founded the company with his brother in 2014 and it became publicly traded on NASDAQ in 2017. Ryan has a notable record of successful startup exits in his career that spans 25 years in tech. In earlier companies, as you will hear today, the Steelberg brothers applied large-scale data processing to advertising before that was commonplace and were instrumental in the development of what we now call programmatic advertising. Veritone today provides an AI platform, aiWare, that applies large-scale processing of unstructured data to a variety of use cases that range from revenue generation to back-office operations. Prior to Veritone, Ryan was CEO of Brand Affinity technologies, Head of Radio at Google after the acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting where he was president and co-founder, CEO of 2CAN Media, and President of AdForce, a company he co-founded while still an undergrad at UCLA.