The Voicebot Podcast

Bernadette Nixon is CEO of Algolia, a company that processes more than 1.5 trillion searches per year for over 10,000 customers. She joined the company in early 2020 in the midst of the global pandemic and what turned out to be explosive growth. Prior to Algolia, Nixon was CEO of Alfresco, President of SDL, and an SVP at OpenText. She has worked across the spectrum of search from pure SaaS solutions to open source and now is steering the API-first solution approach at Algolia which includes elements of customized programmability and SaaS. We go deep this week on search, how it is evolving, and the nuances of voice search. We also discuss Algolia's recent $150 million funding round which conferred unicorn status on the company with a valuation exceeding $2 billion.

Conversation designers Diana Deibel and Rebecca Evanhoe discuss the practical knowledge required to design effective conversations with things such as chatbots and voice assistants. We also discuss the evolution of conversation design over time and across modes of interaction. Diana Deibel is a director at Grand Studio where she helps clients create user-focused experiences, including many that involve voice user interfaces. Before Grand Studio, Deibel was a VUX design lead at Allstate, voice user interface designer at Emmi Solutions, and a media producer. Rebecca Evanhoe is a visiting assistant professor at the Pratt Institute where she teaches a graduate course in conversational user experience design. She is also a founding contributor to Women in Voice and earlier was a conversation design consultant at AWS and Mobiquity and a writing instructor at the University of Florida.

Natalie Monbiot is head of strategy and business development for Hour One. She is working with companies across a number of industries as varied as real estate, eLearning, automotive, and consumer brands and is shaping Hour One's go-to-market and growth strategies. Prior to Hour One, Monbiot was an SVP at Publicis where she worked on new technologies and the Samsung account. She was an SVP at UM Worldwide before that focused on digital and strategic innovation and earlier in her career worked at IPG Media Lab and also previously worked in media planning for fortune 500 clients. Monbiot earned a Masters's Degree from Oxford.

Yakir Buskilla is CEO and co-founder of Cocohub, a publicly traded company on the Israeli stock exchange best known for its no-code chatbot development suite. Recently, the company is increasingly associated with virtual human technology, and Anna, one of the characters it developed as a chatbot avatar for deployment on Zoom and through other video channels. Buskilla took over as CEO after several years at Nielsen where he oversaw the company's R&D operation in Israel. Earlier, he co-founded Semanix which was focused on improving patent search technology. He has a background in Machine Learning, Big Data, cloud hosting, and back-end software development and began his career as a software engineer.

Orchid Bertelsen is head of digital strategy and innovation at Nestle USA. She has created the digital innovation road maps for over 40 Nestle brands as well as delivering new projects such as Ruth the cookie coach virtual human. Prior to Nestle, Orchid spent several years in the digital agency world and in consulting. Today we discuss the anatomy of a virtual human project for a consumer brand - the rationale, the tech, the project stages, and more. We also discuss Alexa skill development for consumer brands circa 2016 and how that shaped the development of a virtual human cookie coach in 2021.

Brandon Kaplan is CEO of Skilled Creative, an agency he founded in 2017 that focuses on helping leading media and consumer brands deploy voice technologies for user engagement and commerce. Today, we discuss his firm's work with HBO, Pottermore, Meredith, and a few consumer brands along with dominant trends in the industry. Kaplan received an outstanding achievement award for industry contributions from Project Voice in 2021. Prior to his current agency, Kaplan was President of Ruxly Creative and co-founder of Evantage. He began his career at Stanley Black and Decker.

Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek is founder and CEO of the non-profit Women in Voice which was started in 2018. She is an advisor to several companies in the voice AI space, a popular conference speaker, and a consultant for voice user experience design. After earning an undergraduate degree in French, Photography, and Graphic Design, Bajorek received a Masters in Linguistics from UC Davis and then of PhD in speech language technology from the University of Arizona. Today we discuss the latest growth figures and activities for Women in Voice, a recent VC elevator pitch event for female founders in the voice AI industry, and some of the latest trends in voice user experience design.

Brad Stone is the New York Times bestselling author of two books about Amazon, The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound. Together, they tell a complete story of Amazon over 25 years of evolution. Amazon Unbound includes an in-depth look at the origin behind Amazon Alexa and Echo and their implications for the industry. Stone is a senior executive editor overseeing tech industry reporting at Bloomberg News. He began his tech reporting career at Newsweek covering Silicon Valley and was later a technology correspondent for the New York Times before joining Bloomberg in 2010.

Joseph Turow is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication -- the same school where he earned his PhD. Turow is the author of over 150 articles and 10 books including the recently published The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet. He has some pointed critiques of how voice technology is used, what should change, and where we need further debate. We go point-by-point through many of these arguments and find both common ground and areas of disagreement I thoroughly enjoyed this discussion in part because so often I only hear people in our industry discuss the technology's benefits. I don't agree with all of Professor Turow's conclusions but I recognize that he is addressing a series of important questions that many people in the industry mostly ignore.

Ian Freed is co-founder and CEO of Bamboo Learning, the creators of award-winning Alexa skills for childhood education. As you know, 2020 changed everything in education and Bamboo is filling an interesting gap for in-home learning since 2018. Before Bamboo, Ian spent nearly 13 years at Amazon. While there he served in the coveted Tech Assistant to the CEO role where he was Jeff Bezos' shadow for a year. Afterward, Freed become Vice President of Kindle and then Vice President of Amazon Devices. While in the devices leadership role, the development and launch of Amazon Echo, Alexa, and Fire Phone all reported up to him. That is some unique insight for you today.  We discuss Ed Tech, how COVID-19 and quarantine changed education, the early days of Echo and Alexa, and how the market has evolved.