The Voicebot Podcast

James Chapman is VP and GM of music and wearables at Qualcomm, which means he oversees both hearables and smart watches. Qualcomm is a driving force behind the chips that make each subsequent hearable generation more powerful and more power-efficient. Chapman arrived at Qualcomm in 2015 as part of the $2.4 billion CSR acquisition where he oversaw 400 engineers and later led the company's auto, CE, and IoT segments. Before CSR, Chapman spent many years in engineering and product roles at Broadcom. Since arriving at Qualcomm, among other accomplishments, Chapman oversaw the rollout of the QCC1541 chip which is the workhorse of the true wireless earbuds market today. He earned a PhD in condensed particle physics from Oxford and has an MBA from Henley Business School.

Verbit just closed a $60M funding round after raising $30M earlier this year and $21M in 2019. We break down the company's AI-plus-human automated transcription business model, what is driving growth, and how the new funding will be employed. Tom Livne is CEO and co-founder of Verbit since 2017. Previously, he was co-founder and CEO of AppInsight. Tom is a graduate of the Yale School of Management and Technion and earned a law degree at IDC Herzliya. He previously appeared in episode 89 of Voicebot Podcast in early 2019.

Dennis Crowley is co-founder and executive chairman of Foursquare, a pioneer in the rise of the mobile, local, and social apps famous for pioneering the venue check-in concept. Today, it supports popular consumer apps and a large enterprise business around consumer geolocation data. The company has 150,000 developer partners and says it powers location experiences for more than 1 billion people globally. Foursquare recently introduced Marsbot, an audio AR solution (i.e. a proactive walking assistant) that creates a reason to keep your hearables in all day when moving around a city or town. Marsbot harvests the nearly endless data from Foursquare's community and whispers nuggets of content to users as they go through specific locations. Crowley started out in the early dotcom days as a research analyst and then became known for organizing large scale games that integrated technology with real-world settings. He then founded Dodgeball which was location-based social software for mobile devices and was acquired by Google in 2005. That led to some time at Google as a product manager before co-founding Foursquare in 2009.

Kane Simms is co-founder of VUX World, a voice studio, design consultancy, and creator of a popular industry podcast and numerous LinkedIn videos. Today, we discuss voice user experience design and specifically cover some elements of VUX World's methodology when working with clients. We also review voice strategy, industry trends, and much more. Kane is an astute observer of the voice industry landscape and one of the technology's most effective champions.

Dr. Ben Goertzel is co-founder and CEO of SingularityNet, an open, decentralized platform for connecting and orchestrating interactions between artificial general intelligence (AGI) agents and other software. He has been a leader in the pursuit of AGI for over 20 years. Goertzel is also an innovator and researcher in NLP including a recent paper on unsupervised grammar induction. Earlier, Goertzel led the software team that produced the intelligence behind the world's most famous robot, Sophia, as chief scientist at Hanson Robotics. He is also chairman of OpenCog and of the Artificial General Intelligence Society. Dr. Goertzel earned a PhD in Mathematics from Temple University.

Dr. Dave Patterson earned a PhD in artificial intelligence at Ulster University where he also led an AI research lab. He also has degrees in computer science and biochemistry. Dave spent 15 years as a senior lecturer at Ulster University before leaving to become the founding CEO of Sophia, an advanced search technology company that helped online publishers match advertising to reader interests. In 2017, Sophia Search was acquired by Aiqudo where Dave and his team added NLU capabilities to the Aiqudo action engine. Today we talk about AI, NLU, NLP, semiotics and symbolic language representations, and much more. We break down how Aiqudo's architecture is different from other popular voice assistant platforms and how that enables higher efficiency in NLU training through unsupervised learning as well as semantic understanding accuracy.

Dr. Monica Lam joined Stanford University's computer science department in 1988 after earning a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. She is co-author of the textbook Compilers Principles, Techniques, and Tools, known as the Dragon Book. More recently she has been leading the Open Virtual Assistant initiative that has at its core, the Almond open source voice assistant. Today we talk about privacy, security, the need for choice of virtual assistants that are not controlled by 2 or 3 big companies, and the importance of reducing the cost of data annotation to make voice assistant development more accessible to a wider variety of organizations.

Phillip Hunter is the founder of CCAI Services where he helps companies develop voice user experiences using conversation AI and ML solutions. He previously was a vice president of Pulse Labs, head of user experience for Alexa Skills at Amazon, a Senior UX manager at AWS, a senior designer for Bing and Tellme while at Microsoft, a senior designer at 24-7.ai with a few more stops along the way during his career. He earned a degree in English from Texas A&M University. Today we discuss voice UX principles, Phillip's experience in the industry, and whether Alexa is living up to its promise.

Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek is CEO of Women in Voice an organization she founded in 2018. It has grown to 15 chapters in nine countries and has hosted over 80 events worldwide. Bajorek is an advisor to several companies in the voice AI space and a sought-after conference speaker and 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 a PhD in speech language technology.

My guests today are long-time voice developers and well know leaders in the developer community. Mark Tucker is senior architect for voice technology at Soar.com and owner of Shazaml Design. He is also an Alexa Champion, Bixby Premiere Developer, and was named one of Voicebot's Top Leaders in Voice for 2019. He has a degree in Management Information Systems from Brigham Young University and 25 years of software development and architecture experience. Allen Firstenberg is project guru for Objective Consulting also with 25 years of software development experience. He earned a degree in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Allen is a Google Developer Expert for Google Assistant, IoT, Wearables, and other platforms. He first started developing for voice on Google Glass and then was one of the early developers on Google Assistant. Collectively Mark and Allen are the creators of the Two Voice Devs podcast and YouTube channel where they go deep on topics of interest to voice developers.