The Voicebot Podcast

Bahubali Shete founded TinyChef in 2016 (originally known as Klovechef) as an IoT-plus-voice interactive cooking experience and pivoted to an ML-based and software-only solution two years later. That move led to the company's Sanjeev Kapoor Recipes becoming the number one Alexa skill in India for cooking and the default first-party solution for Amazon in the country. TinyChef Alexa skills are also available in the U.S. and Canada and recently implemented the new Alexa Shopping Cart beta for in-skill voice commerce transactions.  We discuss Shete's journey to 1 million users, the success of his voice commerce initiatives so far, and the behavior of users when employing voice apps for cooking and meal planning activities. 

Aakrit Vaish is CEO and co-founder of Haptik an enterprise SaaS solution for building conversational AI-based intelligent assistants. The company's clients range from Samsung and Oyo to KFC, Coca-Cola, Club Mahindra, and Zurich Insurance.  Haptik was acquired by Reliance Jio in 2019 for $100 million. It has a large user base in customer service applications but has more recently expanded its offerings in conversational e-commerce. Haptik customers have managed over 2 billion conversations on 100 million devices.  Vaish founded Hapitk in 2013 after several years as director of ops and the India business at Flurry, the leading mobile app analytics platform. He has an engineering degree from the University of Illinois. 

Three guests join to share their social audio insights, how Clubhouse is evolving and approaches for using the social network.  Mitch Joel (4:02) is well-known for the book and podcast both named Six Pixels of Separation. He is also a highly sought-after speaker on tech trends. Kate O'Neill (20:54) is author of Pixels in Place, a tech humanist, and an optimistic futurist. She is also a popular speaker at conferences and corporate events. Dr. Teri Fisher (39:30) is a sport and exercise physician, voice industry influencer, and creator of the Voice Den.  

Three guests today share their Clubhouse experience and offer several strategies on how to get the most out of the new social audio network. Perspectives are shared from a voice AI tech startup founder, a tech event organizer, and venture capital investor. 5:02 - Monique Howard, Founder & CEO of Smarticles (mysmarticles.com) 18:43 - Tyler Crowley, Founder, Sthlm Tech Meetup / Week / Fest (sthlm.tech) 39:58 - Adriana Freitas, Partner at Muster Ventures and Deep Green Impact Ventures (musterventures.com)

Ilya Gelfenbeyn was the founding CEO of API.ai. He and his team were true pioneers in the voice AI industry and were rewarded for those efforts through an acquisition by Google in 2016. API.ai was the development environment that most of the first Google Actions were built upon along with tens of thousands of chatbots. It is better known today as Dialogflow after a rebranding in 2017, and is one of the most widely used solutions for building conversational AI experiences. What you may not know is that API.ai was preceded by Speaktoit which was known as the Siri of Android. Speaktoit amassed over 40 million users for the app-based virtual assistant. The experience taught the team a lot about the tooling required to deploy a successful conversational assistant. That ultimately led to the creation of developer tools and the pivot into API.ai which we discuss in today's interview.  Gelfenbeyn later was a founding member of Google Assistant investments where he was involved in direct funding of several prominent voice AI startups. Today he leads an angel syndicate called The AI where he invests in AI-related companies.

Today we interview three active users of Clubhouse in our series around the rise of social audio. Vajresh Balaji is first with his analysis of total Clubhouse users and how the app has changed over the past six months.  Laura Gassner Otting is a best-selling author of the book Limitless and corporate consultant. She also hosts some of the most popular rooms in Clubhouse.  Our final guest is Adam Soccolich, the creator of The Best of Clubhouse newsletter and website. He offers insights on a variety of different ways users employ the app and highlights on the recent developments. 

Jeremiah Owyang is tech analyst that is closely tracking the rise of social audio networks. In this week's interview, we discuss Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and some of the 25 other social audio startups he monitors. Jeremiah weighs in on six product categories that are growing up around social audio along with business models, monetization strategies, and predictions. We also evaluate the intersection of social audio and voice AI technology.  Owyang is a founding partner of technology research firm Kaleido Insights. He previously worked as an analyst at Forrester and was a co-founder of Altimeter Group. He began his career as a UX designer and today is known for his work as a tech analyst, startup advisor, and angel investor. 

Rachael Tatman has a PhD in linguistics from the University of Washington and began testing voice assistant speech recognition systems like Amazon Alexa from a research perspective in 2016. Today, Rachael is Senior Developer Advocate at open source conversational AI startup Rasa. She marries a deep computational and data science background with an understanding of linguistics to provide a unique view on conversational AI design and performance. 

Vijay Balasubramaniyan is CEO of Pindrop, a leader in voice authentication technology for call centers. The interview was conducted on Clubhouse to discuss a new expansion of Pindrop to personalized consumer experiences such as media access on TiVo.  Vijay co-founded Pindrop in 2011 after completing his PhD in computer science at Georgia Tech. Earlier in his career, Vijay was a research engineer at IBM and software engineer at Siemens and Intel. He first appeared on the Voicebot Podcast in Episode 86. 

Hans van Dam began his career as a copywriter for science and technology companies and that role led him to become a chatbot designer in 2014. His experience working in conversational design led to the realization that few enterprises had a standard model for conversational user experience development nor did they have any idea how to staff a team for success.  In 2018, Hans co-founded the Conversation Design Institute to establish processes, techniques, and organizational standards to professionalize the role of conversation design within large enterprises. Today we talk about the present and future of conversation design and how it will shape the future of conversational experiences.