The Voicebot Podcast

Over the past few weeks, I have brought in executives from three companies with specialty assistants that have shown early promise: Deutsche Telekom, Josh.ai, and Aider. Today, we take a different angle on this topic and focus specifically on the design of specialty assistants. And, we invited a crew that has worked on multiple specialty assistants over the past few years. My guests are Christophe Esslinger, Mohamed Hassan. and Dr. Barbara Baumeister all from VUI Agency in Germany. Christophe is Director of VUI Agency and a co-founder. He earned a PhD in economics from the University of Mannheim and later was a co-founder of Botflux, a chatbot technology and UX design firm. He launched VUI Agency in 2017. Hassan is a Voice AI Experience Architect and design lead. Before VUI he worked at Denkwerk in Cologne as a senior experience designer, also working primarily in voice interactive solutions. He has a master's degree in integrated design from the Koln International School of Design and is studying for his PhD. Barbara is Voice Architect with previous experience working on Cortana at Microsoft and has a PhD in phonetics and language processing from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. We cover a wide range of topics from their work with Swisscom and other companies defining voice assistant personas, establishing a structured voice assistant design process, working with internal client teams, and much more.

Brendan Roberts founded Aider in 2017 after more than 15 years helping small businesses with their communications and IT needs. Roberts hacked together a specialty voice assistant using off-the-shelf technologies in 2017 to prove that it could help address common problems faced by small businesses. He then launched Aider as a specialty assistant for small business managers more than a year ago in New Zealand and Australia and then in July expanded to North America. Aider helps small businesses by integrating with a variety of third-party solutions they already use today ranging from accounting to inventory and marketing. The assistant makes it easier to access the information in those systems today and soon will also enable the execution of voice-directed actions. The assistant can be accessed via the Aider mobile app or through popular general-purpose assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant. In December, the company closed a seed round of funding which included Coca-Cola's investment arm. Previously, Brendan was a co-founder of 9 Spokes an IT services company in New Zealand. Before that he spent many years in telecom at Vodaphone in New Zealand and Carphone Warehouse in London. We talk getting started, the role for specialty assistants, build or buy decisions for technology, managing through COVID when you see your customer's revenues fall off a cliff before they do, and more.

Alex Capecelatro and his co-founder started Josh.ai in 2015 though the technology development preceded that by almost five years. Josh.ai is solely focused on creating assistant-enabled luxury home automation that supports both touch and voice interaction but Alex tells me it can go much further in the market as well. The company has its own smart speakers, its own assistant and enough momentum to recently raise $11 million from investors on top of an earlier round of $8 million. Alex previously was founder of Yeti which was acquired in 2015. Earlier in his career, he was a research scientist and earned a degree in materials science and engineering from UCLA.

You know about Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant. What about the German alternative from Deutsche Telekom, Hallo Magenta? You are going to learn a lot today from Reghu Thanumalayan, Innovation Lead for Deutsche Telekom's Hallo Magenta Voice Assistant. He led the technology team that brought Magenta to market in 2019. Reghu shares insights about what Magenta does, how consumers are using the smart speaker today, the integration with Alexa, and even how it is enabling others to build their own enterprise assistants. We cover a lot of ground today. Before Telekom, Reghu was VP of software engineering at SAP for more than a decade.

As we shift into an era of voice there is an open question about where we will get all that content required for audio responses to voice queries. Trinity Audio's Ron Jaworski has a simple answer: convert millions of pages of website and other text content into audio instantly using text-to-speech. This is a really interesting and broader discussion than you might think. TTS on webpages is a gateway to several interesting integrations of voice with our visual digital world as it is today. Ron Jaworski is co-founder and CEO of Trinity Audio, a company determined in Ron's words, to audiofy, the world wide web. They have an audio player you can install on your website that will make the content listenable using TTS. However, they go beyond this by understanding context and creating an approach for delivering more than just page content and increasing time on page. Prior to founding Trinity, he was CEO of Meme Global Media. Today we talk audio content, voice assistants, and the building blocks of a new tech platform.

Many people have been stuck inside for the past several weeks and some are trying out voice games to pass the time or just explore the latest developments in voice-interactive entertainment. Two games that have gotten a good deal of attention are The Vortex and the 3% Challenge, both from Doppio Games. These offer different examples of how to implement a game strategy on the leading voice platforms and serve as a jumping-off point for the conversation today with Jeferson Valadares, the co-founder and CEO of Doppio Games. We discuss these games in depth, how they differ creatively and from a business model standpoint. We also talk about monetization strategies, how voice revenue models differ from mobile and other gaming platforms and much more. Jeferson brings a deep background in game development to Doppio. He is a member of the Board of Directors at Rovio Entertainment was formerly VP/GM of the BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment and also spent time at top tier game studios such as EA, BioWare, and Digital Chocolate.

Tal Wanderow is CEO of Vocalis. He and host Bret Kinsella discuss the latest progress behind employing vocal biomarkers to evaluate health conditions and risks. We go into detail about the current work behind tools for diagnosing and monitoring COVID-19 patients. We even explore the ethics of what data patients should have a right to access. Vocalis Health is focused on using vocal biomarkers to identify the likelihood of hospitalization for a variety of conditions and have another product focused on respiratory disease detection and monitoring. Given that background, it's not surprising that the company has taken a prominent role in the healthcare industry response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The topic today is voice assistant adoption in the car. It is rising quickly according to data from a recent report by Voicebot. My guest to discuss the trends behind drivers and voice is Sanjay Dhawan of Cerence, the spin-out of Nuance Automotive that since last October has been an independent publicly-traded company. Cerence has voice technology in over 300 million automobiles on the road today. So, Sanjay and his team have a lot of insight into where the industry has been, where it is now and where it's headed. You have a couple of options to follow along with this episode. First, there is a video of the interview with the charts available at Voicebot.ai/webinars. Second, you can download the full In-car Voice Assistant Consumer Adoption Report 2020 at no cost by going to Voicebot.ai/research.

Meredith is a media powerhouse that reaches over 180 million people with some of the top brands in publishing including People Magazine, Allrecipes, Entertainment Weekly, Travel + Leisure, Food and Wine, Instyle, Real Simple, Southern Living, Better Homes and Gardens and dozens of other brands. In addition, Meredith operates 17 local television stations in 12 U.S. media markets. Meredith has invested in voice enabling several magazine titles and is expanding support for Amazon Alexa skills. In our conversation, we discuss Meredith's Entertainment Weekly Alexa skill, the new Real Simple meditation skill, Allrecipes, corporate voice strategy, and more. My guest is Rachel Reed, Senior Innovation Manager at Meredith. Earlier in her career, Rachel was a marketing manager at Time Inc. and also worked at Pallisades Media Ventures, Burson Marsteller, and Johns Hopkins University.

Pandemics have broad impact and the voice industry is no exception to the ripple effects of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. Today's discussion focuses on the intersection of the tech and voice industries and the rise of coronavirus. Joining Bret Kinsella are three guests that are analyzing the coronavirus pandemic closely. Rani Molla is the lead data reporter for Recode and Vox where she writes about tech and how data sheds light on what is really going on. David Watkins is an expert in the global consumer electronics supply chain which includes coverage of many smart devices including smart speakers. Ben Fox Rubin is the lead reporter on Amazon for CNET and speaks to the recent surge in online orders and the company's plans to hire 100,000 new workers in the U.S. to meet demand.