The Voicebot Podcast

Rohit Prasad is vice president and head scientist of Alexa AI at Amazon. He joined the Alexa team pre-launch in 2013 as director of machine learning before moving up to his current role in 2016. In our conversation, we discuss his long-time hope for Star Trek-like technologies, his initial impressions of Siri when it launched, his first day on the Alexa team, the reaction of early adopters, first-party versus third-party experiences, Alexa custom assistants, and much more. Prior to Amazon, Prasad spent nearly 14 years at Raytheon and BBN before its acquisition by Raytheon as a scientist working on speech and voice technologies mostly for government-funded projects. His graduate research at Illinois Institute of Technology focused on low bit-rate speech coding for wireless applications back in the late 1990s.

Cheryl Platz is the author of the new book "Design Beyond Devices, creating multimodal cross-device experiences" published by Rosenfeld. Platz is currently the principal UX designer for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She was on the core team that launched the Echo Look which was Amazon's attempt to inject Alexa into fashion selection. That was preceded by time working on Microsoft's Cortana voice assistant. She began her career as a game producer at EA and Griptonite. Platz is also a cast member and instructor for Unexpected Productions Seattle, an improv comedy troupe and earned a degree in computer science with a focus on human-computer interaction from Carnegie-Mellon University.

Here is Part 2 of our 2021 voice AI predictions. On January 1st, we published over 100 predictions from 50 industry leaders. Today, we go deeper with four guests that add some detail to their thinking around Voice AI in 2021. Topics covered include multimodal design, multimodal displays in healthcare, AI and ethics, voice on mobile, audio and Spotify.  Malaika Paquiot, VP Product K4Connect - 4:10 Roger Kibbe, Senior Developer Evangelist Viv Labs/Samsung - 16:57 Joan Palmiter Bajorek, Head of User Research NLX - 34:30 Dave Kemp, Business Development Oaktree Products - 48:50

On January 1st, we published over 100 predictions from 50 industry leaders. We go a little deeper with four guests today that elaborate on their thinking in Part 1 of our 2021 voice AI predictions episodes. Topics covered include owned/custom voice assistants, first-party voice experiences, virtual humans, and the view of UX designers regarding voice.    Nithya Thadani, CEO RAIN Agency - 4:02 Steve Tingiris, CEO Dabble Lab - 17:17 Amy Stapleton, Co-founder Chatables - 38:18 Jason Fields, Chief Strategy Officer Voicify - 53:38

Today, we have one last Voice AI Year in Review episode. This one is focused on what went down in India in 2020. Today's guests are some of the top Voice AI leaders in India and they share everything from what is happening in voice commerce, WhatsApp, and assistants on feature phones to how Indian consumers differ from the U.S. and much more.  3:24 - Aarkrit Vaish, founder and CEO of Haptik 18:40 - Kumar Rangarajan, Co-founder and CEO of Slang Labs 30:48 - Sarandeep Kaur, co-founder of Women in Voice in India, and conversational AI manager for Novo Nordisk 47:43 - Bahubali Shete, CEO of Klove Chef

Joe Petro is CTO and EVP of R&D for Nuance and has been with the company since 2009. Nuance is a voice giant doing $1.5 billion in annual revenue and has a valuation of over $12 billion today. For over a decade, Nuance essentially defined the voice industry holding many of its most significant patents and dominating several market sectors. Joe oversees an annual R&D budget of over $200 million including new features such as Ambient AI and a COVID-19 bot. Prior to Nuance, Joe was SVP of research and development at Eclipsys, an early leader in electronic medical records. He began his career as a systems engineer at EDS, has a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a master's degree in Computer-Aided Engineering.

Today we talk about voice AI adoption and trends in Europe for 2020. My guests include Niamh Bushnell, chief communications officer of Soapbox Labs, Dominik Meissner, co-founder of 169 Labs, and Alexis Hue, founder and managing director of Voxalyze.  The guests provide a broad perspective given that Soapbox offers ASR tech for children in custom voice interactive experiences for education and entertainment, 169 Labs develops voice experiences for consumer brands and enterprises, and Voxalyze has a SaaS solution for voice app publishers looking to grow their audience.  Today we discuss privacy, whether there is a voice assistant duopoly, custom assistants, voice and media, personalization, voice app developer disappointment, and much more all from a European perspective. 

For 2020, we decided to have a voice developer-specific year-in-review episode to make sure we spent sufficient time focused on the events that were the most impactful for developers. We were lucky to get three very experienced guests to discuss topics ranging from voice on mobile and the rise of custom voice assistants to voice for customer support, the rise of audio, the hype/utility disconnect, messaging, COVID-19, and much more. Michael Myers is vice president of product and head of development at XAPPmedia. XAPP has brought more than 1200 Alexa skills and Google Actions live for several hundred companies. More recently, the company has introduced its machine teaching technologies for complex intent models and custom assistant development. Michael was honored as a Voicebot Top Leader in Voice for 2020 in the technologist category. Also joining us is Voicetech Carl. Carl Robinson is host of the Voicetech Podcast and CEO of Rumble Studio. He has hosted over 80 episodes of his own podcast but this week shares his thoughts as a guest commentator from his home in Paris. He talks a bit about Rumble Studio and its podcast interview automation technology as well as the news of the year. Carl was also honored as a Voicebot Top leader in Voice for 2020 in the influencer category. Steve Tingiris is CEO and founder of Dabble Lab, a leading developer of conversational AI-based experiences across numerous platforms. Dabble Lab has more than 200 YouTube video tutorials about developing voice interactive experiences on Alexa, Cortana, Twilio, Jovo, and more, with more than a million views combined.  Steve is also a beta user of GPT-3 which we get into today.

This is Voicebot Podcast's fourth annual year-in-review episode. We discuss the year's top stories ranging from COVID, contact centers, and custom assistants to the voice AI shift to mobile and the convergence of chat and voice.  Our guests joining the discussion include Tobias Dengel (CEO of Willowtree), Brielle Nickoloff (Head of product at Botmock), and Sarah Andrew Wilson (Chief Content Officer of Matchbox.io). This is the first of three year-in-review episodes. Upcoming are Developer and European perspectives.

Igor Jablokov is the founder and CEO of Pryon, a company that has set out to transform knowledge management in the enterprise with a self-training custom voice assistant that can easily integrate into multiple data sources and be deployed in hours. Pryon raised $20 million in 2019 led by Revolution after closing a $4.5 million seed round in late 2018.  Jablokov is best known as the CEO of Yap, the company Amazon acquired to serve as the technical foundation of Alexa back in 2011. Earlier in his career, he spent 13 years in technical and management roles at IBM. He was awarded an Eisenhower Fellowship in 2013 and named a Top Leader in Voice for 2020 by Voicebot.